rket Street. And
as "plain Tom Van Dorn" he sat down in the shop of the Paris Millinery
Company, Mrs. Herdicker, Prop., and talked to the amiable Prop. for half
an hour--casting sly glances at the handsome Miss Morton, who got behind
him and made faces over his back for Mrs. Herdicker's edification.

But as Mrs. Herdicker, Prop., made it a point--and kept it--never to
talk against the cash drawer, "plain Tom Van Dorn" didn't learn the
truth from her. So he pranced up and down before his scenic
representation of Heaven in the _Times_, and did not know that the
whole town knew that his stage Heaven was the masque for as hot and cozy
a little hell as any respectable gentleman of middle years could endure.

However clear he made it to the public, that he and Mrs. Van Dorn were
passionately fond of each other; however evident he intended it to be
that he was more than satisfied with the bargain that he had made when
he took her, and put away his first wife; however strongly he played the
card of the gallant husband and "dearied" her, and however she smirked
at him and "dawlinged" him in public when the town was looking, every
one knew the truth.

"We may," says the Peach Blow Philosopher in one of his dissertations on
the Illusion of Time, "counterfeit everything in this world--but
sincerity." So Judge Thomas Van Dorn--"plain Tom Van Dorn," went along
Market Street, and through the world, handing out his leaden gratuities.
But people felt how greasy they were, how heavy they were, how soft they
were; and threw them aside, and sneered.

As for the Heaven which the Peach Blow Philosopher may have found for
Henry Fenn and Violet Hogan, it was a different affair, but of slow and
uncertain growth. Henry Fenn went into the sewer gang the day after he
found Violet in the railroad yards, and for two weeks he worked ten
hours a day with the negroes and Mexicans in the ditch. It took him a
month to get enough money ahead to pay for a room. Leaving the sewer
gang, he was made timekeeper on a small paving contract. But every day
he sent through the mails to Violet enough to pay her rent and feed the
children--a little sum, but all he could spare. He did not see her. He
did not write to her. He only knew that the money he was making was
keeping her out of the night, so he bent to his work with a will.

And at night,--it was not easy for Violet to stay in the house. She
needed a thousand little things--or thought she did. And there wa