strangely ignored that which he had come to seek. He was holding two little hands as tightly
as ever he could and looking into two penitent brown eyes, while joy rioted in his heart.
"Dear Jack," she said, "I knew you would be here on time."
"I wonder what she means by that," he was saying to himself; "but it's all right, it's all
right."
A big wind puffed out of the west, picked up the paper from the sidewalk, opened it out and
sent it flying and whirling down a side street. Up that street was driving a skittish bay to a
spider-wheel buggy, the young man who had written to the heart-to-heart editor for a recipe
that he might win her for whom he sighed.
The wind, with a prankish flurry, flapped the flying newspaper against the face of the
skittish bay. There was a lengthened streak of bay mingled with the red of running gear that
stretched itself out for four blocks. Then a water-hydrant played its part in the cosmogony,
the buggy became matchwood as foreordained, and the driver rested very quietly where he
had been flung on the asphalt in front of a certain brownstone mansion.
They came out and had him inside very promptly. And there was one who made herself a
pillow for his head, and cared for no curious eyes, bending over and saying, "Oh, it was
you; it was you all the time, Bobby! Couldn't you see it? And if you die, why, so must I, and
-- "
But in all this wind we must hurry to keep in touch with our paper.
Policeman O'Brine arrested it as a character dangerous to traffic. Straightening its
dishevelled leaves with his big, slow fingers, he stood a few feet from the family entrance
of the Shandon Bells Café. One headline he spelled out ponderously: "The Papers to the
Front in a Move to Help the Police."
But, whisht! The voice of Danny, the head bartender, through the crack of the door: "Here's
a nip for ye, Mike, ould man."
Behind the widespread, amicable columns of the press Policeman O'Brine receives swiftly
his nip of the real stuff. He moves away, stalwart, refreshed, fortified, to his duties. Might
not the editor man view with pride the early, the spiritual, the literal fruit that had blessed
his labours.
Policeman O'Brine folded the paper and poked it playfully under the arm of a small boy that
was passing. That boy was named Johnny, and he took the paper home with him. His sister
was named Gladys, and she had written to the beauty editor of the paper asking for the
practicable touchstone of beauty. That was weeks ago, and she had ceased to look for an
answer. Gladys was a pale girl, with dull eyes and a discontented expression. She was
dressing to go up to the avenue to get some braid. Beneath her skirt she pinned two leaves
of the paper Johnny had brought. When she walked the rustling sound was an exact
imitation of the real thing.
On the street she met the Brown girl from the flat below and stopped to talk. The Brown