sness. To be rollickingly, cleanly free of her.
His teeth shone against the darkness as he walked, drenched to the skin
of his perspiration and one side of his collar loose, the buttonhole
slit.

Rollickingly free of her and yet how devilishly his shoes could clat on
the sidewalk.

To-morrow at six. To-morrow at six. To-morrow at six.

* * * * *

It was some time after midnight when he let himself into the uptown
apartment. He thought he heard his mother, trying to be swift, padding
down the hallway as if she had been waiting near the door. That would
have angered him.

The first of these nights, only four weeks before (it seemed years),
he had come in hotly about four o'clock and gone to bed. About five he
thought he heard sounds, almost like the scratch of a little dog at
his door. He sprang up and flung it open. The flash of his mother's
gray-flannelette wrapper turned a corner of the hall. She must have
been crying out there and wanting him to need her. None the less it had
angered him. These were men's affairs.

But in his room to-night the light burned placidly on the little table
next to the bed, a glass of milk on a plate beside it. The bed was
turned back, snowy sheets forming a cool envelope for him to slip
in between. The room lay sedatively in shadow. A man's room. Books,
uncurving furniture, photographs of his parents taken on their
twenty-fifth anniversary standing on the chiffonier in a double leather
frame that opened like a book. Face down on the reading table beside the
glass of milk, quite as he must have left it the night before, except
where Sara had lifted it to dust under, a copy of Bishop's _New Criminal
Law_, already a prognosis, as it were, of that branch of the law he was
ultimately and brilliantly to bend to fuller justice.

Finally, toward morning Nicholas slept, and at ten o'clock of a
rain-swept Sunday forenoon awoke, as he knew he must, to the grip of a
blinding headache, so called for want of a better noun to interpret the
kind of agony which, starting somewhere around his eyes, could prick
each nerve of his body into a little flame, as if countless matches had
been struck.

As a youngster these attacks had not been infrequent, usually after a
fit of crying. The first, in fact, had followed the burning of the cat;
a duet of twin spasms then, howled into Sara's apron, And once after he
had fished an exhausted comrade out of an ice hole in Bronx Par