r something he couldn't put his finger
on."

"What became of him?"

"Oh, he's still around. I think he found a job somewhere. As a matter of
fact, I saw him just the other evening. He had apparently just come from
work and he was standing in front of Bixby's with his face pressed to
the window looking in. I came up nearby and watched him. Leopold and
Alexander were sitting inside--a couple of lonely old men looking out.
And a lonely young man looking in. There was something in McIlvaine's
face--that same thing I had noticed so often before, a kind of
expression that seemed to say there was something he ought to know,
something he ought to remember, to do, to say, but there was no way in
which he could reach back to it."

"Or forward," I said with a wry smile.

"As you like," said Harrigan. "Pour me another, will you?"

I did and he took it.

"That poor devil!" he muttered. "He'd be happier if he could only go
back where he came from."

"Wouldn't we all?" I asked. "But nobody ever goes home again. Perhaps
McIlvaine never had a home like that."

"You'd have thought so if you could have seen his face looking in at
Leopold and Alexander. Oh, it may have been a trick of the streetlight
there, it may have been my imagination. But it sticks to my memory, and
I keep thinking how alike the two were--old McIlvaine trying so
desperately to find someone who could believe him, and his nephew now
trying just as hard to find someone to accept him or a place he could
accept on the only terms he knows."

THE END

Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from _If Worlds of Science Fiction_ July
1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of McIlvaine's Star, by August Derleth

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