Next day the crash came. The papers revelled in it; the Pallinders' affairs occupied the place of honour (or at least of supreme notoriety) in the first column of the first page; the Pallinders' creditors assembled and filled the air with thunder; Muriel was incontinently recalled to Washington; excited Gwynnes rushed upon the scene. And when at last the smoke of conflict lifted, where were the Pallinders? Nobody knew; nobody cared—except Scheurmann and Goldstein Brothers, and perhaps a few others. Within a fortnight there was a red flag, flaunting garishly on the lawn among the budding lilacs and faintly greening beeches. Templeton had out sandwich-men and yard-long posters announcing an auction in the house—"everything without reserve to the highest bidder."

The Armenians reappeared, and various other greasy-looking, dark-skinned birds of prey flocked through the rooms, rapping on the mirrors, testing the peacock-blue and old-gold draperies between their dirty talons. I met Mrs. Maginnis coming out of Doctor Vardaman's yard, boo-hooing and calling on all the saints to bless him, with a tribe of little Maginnises at her heels. What had the doctor done? I do not know. The old gentleman went quite shabby that summer in an old linen duster we had not seen on him for years; and it is certain he bought no more first editions for a long while.

And here closes the episode—for episode it truly was, and no story, as must have been discovered by this time. A story, properly conceived and executed, must have a beginning and an end, and this lacks both; it even lacks a hero and heroine. Fiction would have demanded, and a conscientious storyteller would have supplied, a much more picturesque and appropriate final act. The diamonds should have been restored, and (let us hope) the bill paid; Muriel should have married J. B.; Bob should have married Mazie; the curtain should have gone down on the lovers embracing and everyone else shaking hands. I have not been a novel-reader all these years for nothing, and nobody need remind me how a romance should end; if this narrative finishes in open defiance of all the proprieties, I can only offer the mean apology that it is all, or nearly all, true. Pars minima fui! Some of it I saw, some heard, some merely guessed, and alas, none of the beautiful things mentioned above came to pass! Looking back on it now, with the compliant wisdom of forty-odd, I am satisfied it is as well those marriages did not take place. Muriel would hardly have been a success transplanted; and the Pallinder connection would inevitably have proved disastrous to poor Bob.

As for Huddesley, I cannot sincerely say I was ever sorry that that entertaining and original scoundrel escaped; in other and more gallant days, he and the Pallinders alike might have figured as a sort of pirates, differing in degree and methods perhaps, hardly at all in kind. There is humour in the spectacle of one of them preying on the other. And, for the soul of me, I cannot be angry with either. Bon voyage, oh ye adventurers! What shores have you not coasted, and what men essayed in all these twenty-five years! At least I did not suffer by you, and therefore, with a noble generosity, I wish you well!

I fell in with J. B. the other day, after a long interval; and he had a good deal to tell me in the pleasant hour we spent of, "Don't you remember——" and "Whatever has become of——?" J. B. goes up and down the world, and knows many men and their cities these days; he is getting a little bald and massive, yet is still a notable figure, not greatly changed; and, "What do you think?" he said, "I've seen Huddesley, and he knew me at once! It was the year of the St. Louis Fair; that's the last time I was West, you know. I went from there to the town of Joliet, Illinois, where you know the Government runs an elegant home for ladies and gentlemen whose society and services the community doesn't need all the time.

"I went out there—voluntarily," he added, with a chuckle. "It was the Fourth of July and blazing hot, and I had three hours to put in before my train left. The man I went to see told me I'd find the Pen 'very instructive.' But when I got there, they were giving all these wretches a holiday, in honour of Uncle Sam's birthday, and I tell you they were a pretty hard-looking set. The guard was showing me through a yard, when suddenly one of these jolly, cursing, sky-larking parties in stripes dropped out of a bunch of them, and, says he, getting in the way, and staring hard at me: 'Mr. Breckinridge, don't you know me?' I didn't at all, for a minute, although really, considering his age, and the kind of life he must have led, he hasn't changed much. Then: 'Will you 'ave 'ock with your hoysters, sir?' said the scoundrel with a wink—and it flashed on me who he was! 'Huddesley!' I shouted out. The attendant was perfectly petrified; he thought I must be some old pal of Huddesley's—I had to explain before he would let us talk. Eh? Why, sure! As the children say, sure! I talked to him, and he asked after everybody with the greatest interest. He even got quite autobiographical and confidential after a while; told me he was up for five years this time (for a little trouble he got into in New Orleans, he said delicately), but he had served two-thirds of the sentence, and would be out in six months, his time having been shortened for good behaviour. 'There's nothin' to it, anyway, Mr. Breckinridge,' says he, in a serious manner. 'I guess I ought to know, I've tried both ways. It's me for the simple life after this; my eyes are kind of troubling me, and I'm getting along in years. I'm goin' to square it after I get out this time——' He meant he was going to live honestly, you know. 'In all I've spent eighteen years in the stir'—that's slang for the prison, it seems—'with a sentence here and a sentence there, since the first time of all in Pentonville, 'long back in '72. That's a good while out of a man's life that ain't but fifty-five years old. I'm going to cut it out after this. I begun pretty young and I'm through now.' He told me he was London-born, Seven Dials, some slum, I suppose—'That's where Hi got the haccent,' he said, grinning again. He had a chequered career before we knew him, footman, errand-boy, sneak-thief, actor, preacher, insurance-agent, confidence-man—it would be hard to say what he hadn't been. There was an interval when he was apprentice to a pastry-cook—I think he was honest then, for about a year, until the till was left open one evening. He said that was where he learned the trade of cook—'But I was always was one to pick up things quick, you know that, Mr. Breckinridge,' he said with a funny swagger. I asked him if he had had an eye on Mrs. Pallinder's diamonds from the first, or whether he just took the chance when it came. He gave me an odd look. 'Say, you don't mind asking questions, do you?' he said. And then, quickly with a half-laugh: 'Oh, well, Mr. Taylor, you're straight, I know you wouldn't throw me down, and it's twenty years, anyhow.' He went on to say that he had landed in town just about the time of the Charity Ball, when the papers were full of the diamonds—you remember, don't you? The Pallinders were It then. 'I thought I might get the job of butler at the house, and applied,' he said. 'Nothin' doin'—their help was all coloured. The very next day Doctor Vardaman's advertisement came out; say, I was right there with the goods. He was easy, the old gent was. I hadn't spieled my little spiel five minutes before I saw it was 'M' lud, the carriage waits,' for mine. And let me tell you, Mr. Taylor, I was wise to the Pallinder game from the start; I knew Pallinder was due to blow up any day, and your Uncle James would have to hustle to get those diamonds, or somebody else would. That's why I went after 'em by the Romeo-and-Juliet route, 'stead of taking it slow and easy, and getting to be like a son of the house like I'd planned. Well, you know that deal fell through owing to Mrs. Pallinder's neuralgia; if you and the colonel and everybody else had stepped a little livelier, you'd 'a' nipped me. As it was, I just barely had time to get back home; and then what does the faithful, devoted, all-to-the-square-dealing Huddesley do but wake up Doctor Vardaman, and lodge an information against himself——' 'What?' I cried. 'You were the burglar?' To tell the truth, I hadn't quite been able to follow Huddesley's flights of metaphor for the last few sentences, until all at once it come over me what he meant. 'You mean you were the burglar all the time?' I asked him. He grinned with a queer kind of pride. 'Sure I was. But, say, didn't I play it smooth? Couldn't I give Hen. Irving cards and spades, though? Next day I did have a sore throat—I'm subject to 'em—but I wasn't sick like Doctor Vardaman thought. I kept up the game—stayed in bed and passed up the cops and the high-brows with the stylographic pens—I couldn't risk seein' 'em, you know. I don't know how that fellow Judd got on the trail—I guess he had a little more grey matter than the rest of 'em. Of course they had photos and descriptions of me all over the country. Anyway, when he turned up, peddlin' collar-buttons about six weeks later, I was next right off. I knew I'd better beat it for the tall and waving—but I did hate like poison to go without those rhinestones—after all the trouble I'd took, too.' The fellow's persistence and patience were something astonishing," said J. B., with wonder. "Enough to have insured his success at any honest undertaking, you'd think. He told me it was very hard to keep up the rÔle. 'Sometimes I'd forget—about the talk, and all, you know,' he said. 'And then I'd lay awake at nights in a cold sweat for fear somebody had noticed it. Yes, sir, I'd been studying and studying, making myself solid with everybody, and playing the faithful-and-devoted racket until I was sick of it—and no diamonds in sight yet! Then "Mrs. Tankerville" came up, and all at once I began to see a ray o' light. But just as things was going like greased rollers on a toboggan-slide, hanged if the doctor didn't sour on the Pallinders! Said he was never going there again. 'Stead of shooting the chutes, looked like I was due to bump the bumps.'

"'In the end, that was the best thing that could have happened—because, you know, the old gent invited you all to dinner, and the minute he did that, I saw the chance. I knew Johns was a good deal of a lusher, and if I could get him stewed good and plenty, why, I could turn the trick. If some of the rest of you got a little how-come-you-so, not batty, you know, just a little googleish, it wouldn't hurt. But I wasn't taking any chances on Johns; I fixed him with some kind of rock-a-bye-baby dope out of the doctor's closet. You remember what happened after that. Say, I enjoyed it—honest-to-goodness I did; I liked all you boys first-rate. Say, if I'd been different, if I'd been born and brought up like you, for instance, I'd have cut a pretty wide swath, now, wouldn't I? It's all in the start a man gets, ain't it?'"

J. B. paused.

"I dare say Huddesley could imitate me better than I can him," he said. "But wasn't that last a funny thing for a man like that to say? He was in earnest, proud of his peculiar talents, and a little regretful. I didn't know what to say, but I knew better than to sermonise."

"Do you suppose he really did 'square it' after he got out?"

"Not likely, I think. Good resolutions aren't very lasting with that class. I've no doubt he meant it at the time. He asked about Doctor Vardaman. I told him, and do you know the fellow's face clouded over for a second. I believe he really was pained.

"'Well,' he said. 'The doctor was an old man, and of course it wasn't to be expected he could live very much longer. I might have known. But it makes me feel bad, Mr. Taylor. I kind of expected to go and see him when I got out this time, and tell him I was going to finish out on the square. He was the whitest man I ever knew. I never took the value of a cent from him, though I had plenty of chances; yes, sir, he was the real thing, that old gent was.' And, just as I was leaving he said: 'I'd like mighty well to know who that nice little trick was that I kissed on the back stairs when I was dusting out with the necklace. I didn't know her name, I guess she didn't ever come to rehearsals when I was around. Kind of a fat little girl, with brown eyes—she was too surprised to squeal; it was a fool thing to do, but I felt pretty good, and she was just my size in girls.' I couldn't place her for him, but I shouldn't wonder if it was Kitty. It would be like Kitty to keep quiet about it." I agreed with him that it would be much like Kitty; her eyes are blue, by the way, but J. B. had forgot that.

His face was a little sober as he answered some of my questions.

"I met the colonel in New York not long ago," he said. "He looks pretty old and seedy and shifty-eyed these days. He talked just the same; had a few shares to sell—just a few, you know, they were soaring up in price and in a week would be unobtainable for love or money, but he wanted to let me in on the ground floor—in a gold mine down in Eastern Tennessee.

"Don't laugh; it wasn't funny. He was too anxious to be so fluent and convincing as he used to be in the old days; he reminded me of a poor, hungry, eager old dog. I bought some of the shares, for the sake of auld lang syne—I couldn't help it. And there was something sordidly pathetic in the air of affluence he put on after he'd gathered the money up in his trembling old hands. I suppose he hadn't handled so much in months; yet the sum was not large. He insisted on my going home to dinner with him; they were in a dingy boarding-house over in Brooklyn. It gave me a start to see Mrs. Pallinder; I actually thought for a minute it was the old Botlisch woman, although she died years ago, the colonel told me. Mrs. Pallinder's got to looking exactly like her, but she has more manner, you know; she put on a lot of 'side' for my benefit. The boarding-house people were very much impressed. I shouldn't wonder if my visit bolstered up the Pallinder credit a good deal—I'm so solidly respectable. But do you know, I'm sure, that aside from any motives of self-interest, the Pallinders were honestly glad to see me; they talked about old times the same as you and I are doing now—just as if they hadn't left owing everybody and under a cloud generally! I wouldn't have opened my mouth about the diamond necklace, and that last night, but Mrs. Pallinder brought it up right away; she rather flourished it before the other boarders. Huddesley and her jewels, and what she said, and what So-and-So said—it was rather diverting to hear her version."

"Mazie wasn't with them, was she?"

"Oh, no, Mazie's married. Married an army-officer, and they're living in the Philippines. Mrs. Pallinder told me the name, but I've forgotten it."

"We used to think that Bob Carson——"

"Yes. Bob's never married—he was awfully in earnest. Remember what a sweet voice he had? They used to get him to sing 'Comfort ye, my people,' in Trinity the last Sunday in Advent, don't you remember? Poor old Bob!"

"Rich old Bob, you'd better say! He's made a lot of money. Susie's children will get it all, most likely. He's very fond of them; he sent the youngest girl to Europe last year to study music, somebody told me. Maybe, if Mazie knew, she'd be sorry she wouldn't have him. But it's better so; they wouldn't have been happy. Do you suppose he ever asked her, though?"

"Well, a man don't—one isn't likely to know about things like that," said J. B. somewhat embarrassed. "But I believe he did—right after the party, in the midst of the rumpus when the Pallinders were getting it right and left from everybody."

"And she refused him? I think it was fine of Bob to ask her. Like you and Muriel, wasn't it?"

"Hey?" said J. B., very much startled. A sudden flush appeared on his amiable, middle-aged countenance; he goes clean-shaven now, he who was so gallantly moustached in eighty-three—such are the mutations of fashion.

"I mean in the play—in 'Mrs. Tankerville,'" I added hastily.

"Oh, the play—oh, yes, I remember." He looked down meditatively, fingering the stem of his wine-glass as we sat at luncheon. Muriel would not have refused him, had she been asked in good earnest; I wondered if he knew it—but I think he was at once too gallant and too simple—honest, kindly J. B.!

"I saw her when I was over this last time," he said. "She's the Countess of Yedborough now, you know. She's got eight children! The oldest girl looks something like her, but not so handsome as her mother was at her age—oh, not to compare. She was the handsomest woman I ever saw."

"Has she changed much?"

"Well, these big women—she's got awfully fat—fine-looking still, of course, but she's too fat." Then, catching my eye inadvertently directed on his own not inconsiderable expanse of light waistcoat, he grinned good-naturedly. "Guess I'd better be careful how I throw stones around here," said he. "I'm living in a glass house myself."

"Did Muriel ask after any of us?"

"Oh, yes, wanted to know about everyone—even Ted Johns. I told her they'd found out that Huddesley put some drug in Ted's wine that night, so that it wasn't liquor that was the matter with him. I thought I'd save his reputation that much, if I could. Poor Ted, how he did waste his life! No man ever had better chances at the beginning, but he was his own worst enemy."

"You might say that of all of us."

"Yes, I suppose so. But we don't all drink like fish. Kind of sad about Teddy; he got some appointment in the commissariat when our troops went to Cuba, and died of the fever at Siboney in '98—you knew that? He ought never to have risked going to that climate; he couldn't have had any constitution left by that time."

I assented, and we paid Teddy's memory the tribute of a moment's silence; yet I dare say we were not thinking so much of him and his career, as of our own youth and the inevitable years.

"Well, this has been very pleasant, but I must go," he said presently and rose. "Next time I come West I'm going to bring my wife; I want her to meet everyone here—the old set, I mean. She's heard me talk about you so much. I wish we could meet a little oftener, but living so far apart—you know——"

Well, fuit Ilium! Fuimus Troes! J. B. will find both the old set and the old town changed greatly (for the better, no doubt) when he returns. The coming generation—nay, the generation that has already arrived, will not remember the look of things as they were in my time. As I was saying, they were tearing down the old Gwynne house the other day.

Transcriber's Note:
A Table of Contents has been added.
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.