ons
connected with them. I had no desires now: I could buy anything in reason
in the whole street. What did Matthew and Moreton want? and little Biddy?
Maude had not "spoiled" them; but they didn't seem to have any definite
wants. The children made me think, with a sudden softening, of Tom
Peters, and I went into a tobacconist's and bought him a box of expensive
cigars. Then I told the chauffeur to take me to a toy-shop, where I stood
staring through a plate-glass window at the elaborate playthings devised
for the modern children of luxury. In the centre was a toy man-of-war,
three feet in length, with turrets and guns, and propellers and a real
steam-engine. As a boy I should have dreamed about it, schemed for it,
bartered my immortal soul for it. But--if I gave it to Matthew, what was
there for Moreton? A steam locomotive caught my eye, almost as elaborate.
Forcing my way through the doors, I captured a salesman, and from a state
bordering on nervous collapse he became galvanized into an intense
alertness and respect when he understood my desires. He didn't know the
price of the objects in question. He brought the proprietor, an
obsequious little German who, on learning my name, repeated it in every
sentence. For Biddy I chose a doll that was all but human; when held by a
young woman for my inspection, it elicited murmurs of admiration from the
women shoppers by whom we were surrounded. The proprietor promised to
make a special delivery of the three articles before seven o'clock....

Presently the automobile, after speeding up the asphalt of Grant Avenue,
stopped before the new house. In spite of the change that house had made
in my life, in three weeks I had become amazingly used to it; yet I had
an odd feeling that Christmas eve as I stood under the portico with my
key in the door, the same feeling of the impersonality of the place which
I had experienced before. Not that for one moment I would have exchanged
it for the smaller house we had left. I opened the door. How often, in
that other house, I had come in the evening seeking quiet, my brain
occupied with a problem, only to be annoyed by the romping of the
children on the landing above. A noise in one end of it echoed to the
other. But here, as I entered the hall, all was quiet: a dignified,
deep-carpeted stairway swept upward before me, and on either side were
wide, empty rooms; and in the subdued light of one of them I saw a dark
figure moving silently about--t