room and closed the door into the kitchen.

"Poor Roxy's getting it now," he remarked when he came back. "The
Merricks took her out of the poorhouse years ago; and if her loyalty
would let her, I guess the poor old thing could tell tales that would
curdle your blood. She's the mulatto woman who was standing in here a
while ago, with her apron to her eyes. The old woman is a fury; there
never was anybody like her for demonstrative piety and ingenious
cruelty. She made Harvey's life a hell for him when he lived at home;
he was so sick ashamed of it. I never could see how he kept himself so
sweet."

"He was wonderful," said Steavens slowly, "wonderful; but until tonight
I have never known how wonderful."

"That is the true and eternal wonder of it, anyway; that it can come
even from such a dung heap as this," the lawyer cried, with a sweeping
gesture which seemed to indicate much more than the four walls within
which they stood.

"I think I'll see whether I can get a little air. The room is so close
I am beginning to feel rather faint," murmured Steavens, struggling with
one of the windows. The sash was stuck, however, and would not yield, so
he sat down dejectedly and began pulling at his collar. The lawyer came
over, loosened the sash with one blow of his red fist, and sent the
window up a few inches. Steavens thanked him, but the nausea which had
been gradually climbing into his throat for the last half-hour left him
with but one desire--a desperate feeling that he must get away from this
place with what was left of Harvey Merrick. Oh, he comprehended well
enough now the quiet bitterness of the smile that he had seen so often
on his master's lips!

He remembered that once, when Merrick returned from a visit home, he
brought with him a singularly feeling and suggestive bas-relief of a
thin, faded old woman, sitting and sewing something pinned to her knee;
while a full-lipped, full-blooded little urchin, his trousers held up
by a single gallows, stood beside her, impatiently twitching her gown to
call her attention to a butterfly he had caught. Steavens, impressed by
the tender and delicate modeling of the thin, tired face, had asked him
if it were his mother. He remembered the dull flush that had burned up
in the sculptor's face.

The lawyer was sitting in a rocking chair beside the coffin, his head
thrown back and his eyes closed. Steavens looked at him earnestly,
puzzled at the line of the chin, and wondering wh