hat was Harber's romance. Just an incredible coincidence, you
say. I know it. I told Harber that. And Mrs. Harber.

And _she_ said nothing at all, but looked at me inscrutably, with a
flicker of scorn in her sea-gray eyes.

Harber smiled lazily and serenely, and leaned back in his chair, and
replied in a superior tone: "My dear Sterne, things that are made in
heaven--like my marriage--don't just happen. Can't you see that your
stand simply brands you an unbeliever?"

And, of course, I _can_ see it. And Harber may be right. I don't know.
Does any one, I wonder?

ALMA MATER

BY O. F. LEWIS

From _The Red Book_

Professor Horace Irving had taught Latin for nearly forty years at
Huntington College. Then he had come back to Stuyvesant Square, in
New York. Now he lived in a little hall bedroom, four flights up,
overlooking the Square.

Habitually he walked from the Square westward to Fourth Avenue, in
the afternoon, when the weather permitted. He had been born only
three doors from where he now lived. The house of his birth had gone.
It was sixty years since he had been a boy and played in this Square.
Now he would pause at the corner of Fourth Avenue in his walks, and
remember the Goelet's cow and the big garden and the high iron fence
at Nineteenth Street and Broadway. Great buildings now towered there.

South along Fourth Avenue he would walk, a little man, scarcely five
feet four in height, even with the silk hat and the Prince Albert
coat. His white hair grew long over his collar, and people would
notice that almost more than anything else about him. He may have
weighed between ninety and a hundred pounds. The coat was worn and
shiny, but immaculate. The tall hat was of a certain type and year,
but carefully smoothed and still glossy.

He would pause often, between Nineteenth Street and Eighteenth Street,
peopling the skyscrapers with ghosts of a former day, when houses
and green gardens lined the streets. The passers-by watched him
casually, perhaps as much as any one notices any one else in New York.
He was, in the Fourteenth Street district, a rarer specimen than
Hindus or Mexican medicine-men. Through the ten years since he had
come, pensioned, from Huntington College, he had become a walking
landmark in this region.

He always walked down on the east side of the street, crossing at
Fourteenth Street. He was carefully piloted, and saluted, by the
traffic policeman. It was a bad crossing. Belo