him.

The old man's lips were working under his stained beard. He turned to
the lawyer with timid deference: "Phelps and the rest are comin' back to
set up with Harve, ain't they?" he asked. "Thank 'ee, Jim, thank 'ee."
He brushed the hair back gently from his son's forehead. "He was a good
boy, Jim; always a good boy. He was ez gentle ez a child and the kindest
of 'em all--only we didn't none of us ever onderstand him." The tears
trickled slowly down his beard and dropped upon the sculptor's coat.

"Martin, Martin. Oh, Martin! come here," his wife wailed from the top of
the stairs. The old man started timorously: "Yes, Annie, I'm coming." He
turned away, hesitated stood for a moment in miserable indecision; then
he reached back and patted the dead man's hair softly, and stumbled from
the room.

"Poor old man, I didn't think he had any tears left. Seems as if his
eyes would have gone dry long ago. At his age nothing cuts very deep,"
remarked the lawyer.

Something in his tone made Steavens glance up. While the mother had been
in the room the young man had scarcely seen anyone else; but now, from
the moment he first glanced into Jim Laird's florid face and bloodshot
eyes, he knew that he had found what he had been heartsick at not
finding before--the feeling, the understanding, that must exist in
someone, even here.

The man was red as his beard, with features swollen and blurred by
dissipation, and a hot, blazing blue eye. His face was strained--that of
a man who is controlling himself with difficulty--and he kept plucking
at his beard with a sort of fierce resentment. Steavens, sitting by
the window, watched him turn down the glaring lamp, still its jangling
pendants with an angry gesture, and then stand with his hands locked
behind him, staring down into the master's face. He could not help
wondering what link there could have been between the porcelain vessel
and so sooty a lump of potter's clay.

From the kitchen an uproar was sounding; when the dining-room door
opened the import of it was clear. The mother was abusing the maid for
having forgotten to make the dressing for the chicken salad which had
been prepared for the watchers. Steavens had never heard anything in
the least like it; it was injured, emotional, dramatic abuse, unique and
masterly in its excruciating cruelty, as violent and unrestrained as had
been her grief of twenty minutes before. With a shudder of disgust the
lawyer went into the dining