on broke upon it without affecting it any more than if it had
been a rock in the sea and the words and the laughter veritable waters.
He held his head down and looked ashamed. Some of the women cast glances
of pity toward him from time to time in a furtive and half afraid way,
and some of the youngest of the men plainly had compassion on the young
fellow--a compassion exhibited in their faces but not in any more active
or compromising way. But the great majority of the people present showed
entire indifference to the youth and his sorrows. Marsh sat with his
head down, but one could catch the malicious gleam of his eyes through
his shaggy brows. He was watching that young fellow with evident relish.
He had not neglected him through carelessness, and apparently the table
understood that fact. The spectacle was making Mrs. Marsh very
uncomfortable. She had the look of one who hopes against hope that the
impossible may happen. But as the impossible did not happen, she finally
ventured to speak up and remind her husband that Nat Brady hadn't been
helped to the Irish stew.

Marsh lifted his head and gasped out with mock courtliness, "Oh, he
hasn't, hasn't he? What a pity that is. I don't know how I came to
overlook him. Ah, he must pardon me. You must indeed Mr--er--Baxter--
Barker, you must pardon me. I--er--my attention was directed to some
other matter, I don't know what. The thing that grieves me mainly is,
that it happens every meal now. But you must try to overlook these
little things, Mr. Bunker, these little neglects on my part. They're
always likely to happen with me in any case, and they are especially
likely to happen where a person has--er--well, where a person is, say,
about three weeks in arrears for his board. You get my meaning?--you get
my idea? Here is your Irish stew, and--er--it gives me the greatest
pleasure to send it to you, and I hope that you will enjoy the charity as
much as I enjoy conferring it."

A blush rose in Brady's white cheeks and flowed slowly backward to his
ears and upward toward his forehead, but he said nothing and began to eat
his food under the embarrassment of a general silence and the sense that
all eyes were fastened upon him. Barrow whispered to Tracy:

"The old man's been waiting for that. He wouldn't have missed that
chance for anything."

"It's a brutal business," said Tracy. Then he said to himself, purposing
to set the thought down in his diary later: