THE following morning he reorganized his neckties, left a pair of white flannels to be pressed at the tailor's; then, his shoulders swathed in a crisp, sprigged muslin, sat circumspectly under the brisk shears of Bert Woods. Bert hovered above him, and commented on yesterday's fiasco. “It comes to the best of 'em,” Bert assured him: “'member how Ollie Stitcher fell down in the world's series at Chicago.” He recited, for Anthony's comfort, the names of eminent pitchers who had “fell down” when every necessity demanded that they should have remained splendidly erect.

His defeat still rankled in Anthony's mind, but the bitterness had vanished, the sting salved by that other memory of the impulsive charm of Eliza Dreen. He recalled all that she had said to him; her words, thoughtfully considered, were just those employed by humdrum individuals in their commonplace discourses; but, spoken by her, they were a thrill with an especial, a significant, importance and beauty. It was inevitable that she should have dreamed things immaculate, rare; things like... white flowers.

“Shampoo?” Bert inquired absent-mindedly.

“And singed, and curled, and sprinkled with violets,” Anthony promptly returned. With a flourish, Bert swept aside the muslin folds.

Then, in the pursuit of a neglected duty, he crossed the town to a quiet corner, occupied by a small dwelling built of smooth, green stone, crowned with a fantastic and dingy froth of wood. A shallow, untended garden was choked with weeds and bushes, sprawling upward against closely-shuttered windows. He had not been to see Mrs. Bosbyshell for two weeks, he realized, with a stir of mild self-reproach. He was aware that his visits to that solitary and eccentric old woman formed her sole contact with a world she regarded with an increasing, unbalanced suspicion.

A minute or more after his knock—the bell handle was missing—a shutter shifted a fraction, upon which he was admitted to a narrow, dark hall, and the door bolted sharply behind him. A short, stout woman, in a formless wrap of grotesquely gorgeous design, faced him with a quivering, apprehensive countenance and prodigiously bright eyes. Her scant, yellowish-white hair was gathered aloft in a knot that slipped oddly from side to side; and, as she walked, shabby Juliet slippers loudly slapped the bare floor.

“Do you want some wood brought in?” Anthony inquired; “and how does the washer I put on the hot water spigot work?”

“A little wood, if you please; and the spigot's good as new.” She sat on a chair, lifting a harassed gaze to his serious solicitation. “I've had a dreadful time since you were here last—an evilish-appearing man knocked and knocked, at one door and again at another.”

Her voice sank to a shrill whisper, “he was after the money.” She nodded so vigorously that the knot fell in a straggling whisp across her eyes. “Cousin Alonzo sent him.”

“Your cousin Alonzo has been dead ten years,” he interposed patiently, going once more over that familiar ground. “Probably it was a man wanting to sell gas stoves.”

“You don't know Alonzo,” she persisted, unconvinced; “I should have to see his corp'. He knows I've a comfortable sum put by, and's hard after it for his wenching and such practices: small good, or bad, he'll get of it when my time comes.”

He passed through the hall to the kitchen, and, unchaining the back door, brought a basket of cut wood from a shed, and piled it beside the stove. Mrs. Bosbyshell inspected with a critical eye the fastening of the door. There was a swollen window sash to release above, a mattress to turn, when he was waved ceremoniously into a formal, darkened chamber. The musty spice of rose pot-pourri lingered in the flat air; old mahogany—rush bottomed chairs, flute-legged table, a highboy and Dutch clock—glimmered about the walls. A marble topped stand bore orderly volumes in maroon and primrose morocco, the top one entitled, “The Gentlewoman's Garland. A Gift Book.”

From a triangular cupboard, she produced a decanter with a carved design of bees and cobalt clover, and a plate of crumbling currant cake. “A sup of dandelion cordial,” she announced, “a bite of sweet. Growing boys must be fed.”

She sat, and with patent satisfaction watched Anthony consume the ropy syrup and cake.

“I met a girl last night,” he told her intimately; “she had hair like—like a roman candle.”

“Did you burn your heart up in it?”

“She told me that I was like the early morning,” he confided with a rush.

Mrs. Bosbyshell nodded her approval.

“An understandable remark; exactly what I should have said fifty years ago; I didn't know the girls of to-day had it in 'em. You've got a good heart, Anthony,” she enunciated. Anthony shuffled his feet. “A good heart is a rare thing to find in the young. But I misdoubt, in a world of mammon, you'll pay for it dear; I'm afraid you will never be successful, so called. It's selling men that that success is got, and buying women, and it's never in you to do those. You wouldn't wish an old woman gone for the sum she'd laid aside.” Her fancies had been wilder than usual, he concluded, as the holt of the door at his hack slid home. Alonzo and her money, one he considered as actual, as imminent, as the other, occupied to the exclusion of all else her dimming brain. He had hoped to converse with her more fully on the inexhaustible subject of Eliza Dreen, but her vagaries had interrupted him continuously. He decided that she was an antiquated bore, but made a mental note to return before the store of wood was consumed.

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