Mr. Delafield, stepping comfortably forth from his club, had dined
especially well, and was in a correspondingly good humour. As the brisk
March wind swept across the corner just in front of him, he meanwhile
settling his glossy hat more firmly on a fine, close-clipped grey head,
a sudden kindly impulse, not entirely usual with him, sent him bending
to his knee to pick up the fugitive slip of white, scribbled foolscap
that fluttered by him, hotly pursued by a slender young man.
"Thanks. Oh, thanks!" murmured the pursuer, as Delafield, with a
courteous inclination of the head, tendered the captured slip.
"Not at all." A consciousness of the boy's quick panting, his anxious
tug at the paper, actually an almost audible beating of the heart, drew
the older man to look carefully at him. A white, oval face, drooping
mouth, black, deep-set eyes that fairly burned into his, compelled
attention.
"Important paper, I suppose?" he inquired lightly. "Wouldn't want to
lose it."
"No--oh, no!"
"Get a wigging at the office?"
"It--it's not--they are my own--it is a poem!" stammered the young man.
Delafield chuckled involuntarily, and then, as a quick red poured over
the other's cheeks, he made a hasty gesture of apology.
"No offence--none at all, I assure you, Mr.--Mr. Poet! I was only taken
by surprise. One doesn't often assist a poet in catching his works!" He
laughed again, a contented after-dinner laugh.
Then, as the young man fell behind him quietly, the incident being
over, an idle desire for company prompted him to delay his own pace.
"Do you write much? Get it printed? Good publisher?" he inquired
genially. Few persons could resist Lester Delafield's smile: his very
butler warmed to it, and the woman who retained her reserve under it he
had never met.
Again the young man blushed. "Published? No, sir; I never dared to
see--I don't know if it's worth being printed," he said.
"But you think it's pretty good, eh? I'll bet you do. I used to. Let me
see it. I'll tell you if it's worth anything."
They had turned into a quieter cross-street; the wind had passed them
by. Standing under a street-light, benevolently amused at his impulse,
Delafield tucked his stick under his arm, uncreased the paper, and
noted the title of the poem aloud: _To the Moon in a Stormy Night._
His eyebrows lifted; he glanced quizzically at the young man, but met
such an earnest, searching look, so restrained, yet so quivering, so
terrified, yet so brave, that his heart softened and he read on in
silence.
A minute passed, two, three, and four. The man read silently, the boy
waited breathless in suspense. The noisy, crowding city seemed to sweep
by them, leaving them stranded on this little point of time.
Mr. Delafield raised his eyes and regarded the boy thoughtfully.
"You say you wrote this?" he demanded.
"Yes, sir."
"When did you write it?"
"Last night."
"Have you any more like it?"
"I don't know if it's like it. I've got quite a good deal more. What do
you----" He could get no further. Drops of perspiration started from
his forehead. His mouth was drawn flat with anxiety.
"This poetry," said Delafield, with a carefully impersonal calm, "is
very good. It is remarkably good. It is stunning, in fact. '_And moored
at last in some pale bay of dawn_'--why did you stop there? Isn't that
rather abrupt?"
"That was when it ended. Do you really think----"
"I don't think anything about it. I know. You have a future before you,
my young friend. I should like to see--Good Lord, what is it?"
For the boy had twined his arms around the lamp-post and was slowly
sinking to the pavement. His face was ghastly white. Delafield grasped
his arm, and as their eyes met, the older man drew a quick breath and
scowled.
"It's not because--you're not--when did you have your lunch?" he
demanded shortly.
The boy smiled weakly.
"And your breakfast?"
"Oh, I had _that_--quite a little--really I did!" he half whispered.
Delafield got him on his feet and around the corner to a restaurant.
As they entered, the smell of the food weakened him again, and he
staggered against his friend, begging his pardon helplessly.
"Soup--and hurry it up, it's immaterial what kind," the host commanded.
As the boy gulped it down he made out a further order, and while the
hot meat, vegetables, and bread vanished and the strong, brown coffee
lowered in the cup, he lighted a long cigar and talked with a quiet
insistence. Later, when his guest blinked drowsily behind a cloud of
cigarette smoke, he asked questions, marvelling at the simple replies.
The boy's name was Henry West; it was twenty-two years since he had
made his appearance in a family already large enough to regard his
advent with a stoical endurance. His people all worked in the mills
in Lowell; he, too, till the noise and jar gave him racking headaches.
He made his first verses in the mill. He had come to New York to learn
to be a clerk in a corner drug-store kept by a distant cousin, but he
couldn't seem to learn the business. The names of the things were hard
to remember. His cousin said he was absent-minded.
And he had to read everything that was in sight: if a thing was
printed he seemed to have to read it. He read books from the library
and the night-school when his cousin thought he was polishing the
soda-fountain. Of all the things he hated--and they were many--the
soda-fountain was the worst. He wanted to study a great deal, but only
the studies he liked. Not algebra and geometry, nor chemistry that
made his head ache, but history and poetry and French. He thought he
would like to know Italian, too. The family supposed he was still in
the drug-store, but he had quarrelled with his cousin and left it a
month ago. He stayed mostly in the library and helped the janitor with
sweeping and airing the rooms. The janitor paid him a little to ease
his own hours of night-watching, and often asked him to supper. He read
nearly all day and wrote at night. It was better than the mills or the
drug-store. He supposed he was lazy--his family always said he was.
"Come to this address to-morrow afternoon and bring the rest of your
poetry with you," said Delafield, "I have an engagement at nine. May I
keep this one till you come?"--he shook the foolscap significantly. The
boy hesitated, almost imperceptibly, then nodded. As Delafield left the
little table he did not rise with him, but sat with his eyes fixed on
the smoke-rings.
"They do not teach courtesy in the night-schools, evidently," mused
the older man, peering for a cab; "but one can't have everything. My
manners have been on occasion commended--but I can't write poetry like
that."
He tasted in advance the pleasure of reading the poem to Anne: how her
brown eyes would dilate and glow, how eagerly her long, slender fingers
would clasp and unclasp. People called her cold, they told him; for
his part he never could see why. True, she was not kittenish, like the
other nieces; she didn't try to flirt with her old uncle, as Ellen's
girls did; but what an enthusiasm for fine things, what a quick, keen
mind the child had! Child--Anne was twenty-five by now. Was it true
that she might never marry? Ellen said--but then Ellen was always
a little jealous of poor Anne's money. The girl couldn't help her
legacies. Still, at twenty-five--perhaps it was true that she expected
too much, thought too seriously, reasoned morbidly that they were after
her money.
Seated opposite her in his favourite oak chair, looking with a sudden
impersonal appraisal at the slender figure in clinging black lace, the
cool pallor of the face under the smooth dark hair, the rope of pearls
that hung from her firm, girlish shoulders, it dawned on him that there
was something wanting in this not quite sufficiently charming piece of
womanhood. She was too black-and-white, too unswerving, too unflushed
by life. Humanity, with its countless moulding and colouring touches,
seemed to slip away from either side of her, like the waves from some
proud young prow, and fall behind.
"Yet she's not unsympathetic--I swear she's not!" he thought, as her
eyes glowed to the poem and her lips parted delightedly.
"'_And moored at last in some pale bay_'--Uncle Les, isn't that
beautiful! Not that it's really so fine as the first part, but it's
easier to remember. And he was hungry? Oh, oh! And you discovered him,
didn't you?"
He nodded complacently.
"I'll bring you around the rest of the things to-morrow. I knew you'd
enjoy this, Anne. You love--really love--this sort of thing, don't you?"
She nodded eagerly.
"But nothing else? Nobody--you don't think that perhaps you're
letting--after all, my dear, life is something more than the beautiful
things you surround yourself with--pictures and music and poetry, and
all that. It really is. There is so much----"
"There is one's religion," she said quietly and not uncordially. But
she had retreated intangibly from him. She sat there, remote as her
cold pearls, as far from the rough, sweet uses of the world as the
priceless china in her cabinets.
"Oh, yes, of course, there is religion," he answered listlessly.
Two days later they sat, all three, in her library, while West read
them his poems. The two looked at each other in amazement. Where had
this untrained factory boy got it all? What wonderful voices had sung
to him above the whirring of the wheels; what delicate visions had
risen through the smoky pall of his sordid days? He wrote only of
Nature: the brown brook water in spring; the pale, hurrying leaves of
November; a bird glimpsed through pink apple-blossoms; the full river
encircling a bending elm. In the vivid swiftness of effect, the simple
subtlety of treatment, there was a recalling of the Japanese witchery
of suggestion; the faint tinge of sadness in every poem left in the
mind precisely the sweet regret that the beauty of the world must
always leave. At the "Clearing Shower," perhaps the most compelling of
all his work, quick drops started to the girl's eyes, so intense was
the vision of the moist, green-breathing earth, the torn fleece of the
clouds, the broken chirping of frightened birds, the softened, yellow
light that reassures and saddens at once. His art was not Wordsworth's
nor Shelley's; it was as if Keats had turned from human passion and
consecrated the beauty of his verse to the beauty of Nature--but
simply, sadly, and through a veil of Heine's tears.
Delafield nodded mutely to his niece, then walked over to the boy.
"There will be plenty of people to tell you later," he said, holding
out his hand, "but let me be the first. You are a genius, Mr. West, and
your country will be proud of your work some day. There is no American
to-day writing such poetry."
West took his hand awkwardly, not rising from his chair. He fingered
his manuscript nervously.
"I--I wouldn't want to be laughed at," he demurred. "Other folks
mightn't be so kind as you. If anybody laughed--I--it would just about
kill me!" he concluded, passionately. They smiled sympathetically at
each other.
"But no one would laugh, I assure you, Mr. West," Anne murmured,
stooping to pick up a scattered sheet.
He hardly noticed her. His eyes were fixed constantly on Delafield: the
girl had made no impression upon him whatever. Nor did the elegance of
the furnishings, the evidences of great wealth everywhere arouse in him
the least apparent curiosity. Having no knowledge of the many grades
of material prosperity between his own meagre surroundings and Anne
Delafield's luxury, he accepted the one as he had endured the other,
his mind quite removed from either, his eyes looking beyond.
Anne had supposed that her uncle would carry the poems to one of the
leading magazines, but he pooh-poohed the idea.
"I think not. We're not going to have the boy mixed up with the hacks
that turn out two or three inches of rhymes to fill up a page in a
magazine," he declared. "We'll have D---- drop in some night and
West shall read 'em to him. Then we'll bring out a book. Here and in
England--they'll like him there, or I'm much mistaken."
In a month it seemed that they had always known him. Intimacy was
so impossible with his inturned, elusive nature, that to have him
sitting through hours of silence by the birch fire, abstracted, dreamy,
inattentive, except to some chance word that stirred his fancy, was
to know him well, to all intents. His nerves, dulled to all great
torments like poverty, hunger, obscurity, quivered like violin strings
under little unaccustomed jarrings. If interrupted in the reading of
his verses he would lose his control beyond belief; a chance cough,
the falling of an ember, put him out of tune for hours. He possessed
little sense of humour, and the lightest satire turned him sulky. A
child might have teased him to madness; it was evident to them that
his utterly lonely life had preserved him from constant torture at the
hands of associates.
Until the book was complete he refused to have the great publisher
brought to hear it read. Sometimes for days they would not see him,
then on some rainy evening he would appear, lonely and hungry, eager
for the praise and warmth of Anne's library, an exquisite poem in his
pocket. Served to repletion by the secretly scornful butler, he would
smoke a while, then draw out the sheet of foolscap, and read in his
nervous yet musical voice the latest page of the book that was to bring
him fame.
On one such night--it was when he brought them "Dawn on the River,"
the only poem of which Anne had a copy, and the one which a well-known
firm afterward printed under his photograph and sold by thousands at
Easter-tide--he broke through the mist--it was too impalpable to be
called a wall of reserve--that held his personality apart from them,
and talked wonderfully for an hour. They seemed to see the clear soul
of some gentle, strayed fawn; his thoughts were like summer clouds
mirrored in a placid brook. All the crowding, sweating humanity of his
stunted boyhood had flowed through his youth like an ugly drain laid
through a fresh mountain stream. He seemed to have lived all his years
with young David on the hillside, and wealth and poverty, crowds and
loneliness, love and death were as far from his life as if the vast
procession of them all that swept by him daily through the great city
had never been.
As he talked, Delafield found his eyes drawn from the boy's face to
Anne's. Never before had he seen just that faint, steady rose in her
cheeks, that sweet glow in her eyes. As she leaned forward, her very
pearls seemed to catch a red tinge from the fire: it occurred to him
for the first time that she looked like Ellen's girls--there was a
suggestion of Kitty in the curve of her cheek.
Was it possible that Anne--no, it could not be. To think of the men
that had tried to come into her life and failed--such men! And this
boy, this elf, to whom no woman was so real or so dear as a tree in the
glen!
For two weeks after that night he did not come. Anne never mentioned
his name, and Delafield, doubtful of what that might portend, tried to
believe that she had forgotten him. Toward the end of the second week
she spoke of the completion of his book, and suggested that her uncle
should invite Mr. D----: "Urge Henry to consent to it," she added, "he
will do anything for you, Uncle Les."
"More than for you?" he asked.
"For me?" She flushed a little. "I doubt if he distinguishes me from my
portrait over the mantel!"
"And you wish that he would," Delafield wanted to reply, trying to
remember if she had ever called him "Henry" before.
On a warm April evening, when the windows were open to catch the
setting sun and the odour of the blossoming window-boxes, he came at
last. As he stepped into the room, head erect, eyes wide and bright,
they became aware immediately of a change in him. His glance was more
conscious, more alert, his hand-grasp more assured.
"You are in time to dine with us," Anne said, with her grave smile, "we
are all alone. Will you stay?"
"Thanks, I can't stay, I'm going somewhere else," he answered quickly.
"And the new poem?" Delafield inquired, "did you get it done? That was
to be the last, wasn't it?"
"Oh! I haven't been writing lately," he explained, blushing a little.
"I've been too busy--that is, I've been too--I've been thinking of
something else." He stood before them in the full light of the late
day; every expression in his sensitive, mobile face showed clear.
"A perfectly wonderful thing has happened," he burst out, "you couldn't
understand. Nobody can understand but me, and--and----"
"Who is she?" said Delafield bluntly.
"How did you know?" cried the boy, "have you seen--did she tell----"
"Of course not. When did it happen?"
Delafield kept his face persistently from Anne's. For the world he
could not have looked at her.
"It was last week." West was smiling eagerly at him, ignoring the
woman's presence.
"I went into the grocer's to do an errand for Mr. Swazey, and she was
behind the little grating--you pay her. She is the cashier. I didn't
take my change, and she had to call me back, and we dropped it all
over the floor. She helped me pick it up. Oh, if you could see her, Mr.
Delafield!"
"Is she handsome?"
"She is a perfectly beautiful woman," said the boy.
"Dear, dear!" murmured the older man.
"We are engaged, but her mother objects to me. In fact--in fact, her
mother doesn't know that she is engaged. She has been engaged before.
But she never really loved the man. Her mother doesn't care for
poetry----"
At that word, Delafield, with a distinct effort, connected this
babbling druggist's clerk with his poet of "The Clearing Shower." There
could be no doubt that they were the same person. As in a dream he
listened to the boy.
"And that's what I dropped in to see about. I told her mother all you
said about me being sure to be well-off some day, and about the book
being published soon, and her brother, that's Pippa's uncle----"
"What name did you say?"
"Pippa. That's her name. Philippa it is really; she was named after
the daughter of a lady her mother nursed when she was sick, and so she
named her after this lady's daughter. But she couldn't say it plain,
you see, so she always called herself Pippa for short, and so they all
call her that still. I suppose you never heard it before--I never did."
"It is a strange name--for a cashier," said Mr. Delafield.
"Yes, indeed. Well, her Uncle Joseph is a stenographer in a newspaper
office, and he knows a good deal about this sort of thing, and he says
not to publish with the D----s. He says they're a poky firm and don't
advertise enough. If I gave the book to the L----s they'd push it
along, he says. He says they'd make anything sell. The D----s wouldn't
put up posters on bill-boards, now, would they?"
"I suppose not," said Delafield. He felt unaccountably tired. He had
not realised till now how much his mind had been filled with Henry West
and his poetry, how much he had anticipated introducing his rare young
protegé.
"And of course I want to do the best for myself----"
"Of course, beyond a doubt."
How could a person change so in two weeks? What had turned that
sensitive dreamer into this bustling young lover?
"You see, sir, I've got a good many things to consider," he smiled
happily.
"Certainly, West, I appreciate that. At the same time I doubt if you
will do better with anybody than you can with Mr. D----. It may be the
L----s wouldn't want your book. It is not what is known as a popular
book, you know. Poetry appeals to a limited public, and----"
"Oh, well, it's all right. Only I thought you might want to know what
Uncle Joseph said, that's all. I must go now," and he turned.
"Miss Delafield is still here," said her uncle, coldly.
"Oh, good-night," West murmured, and left the room.
"Is it really he?" Delafield hazarded, hardly glancing at her. She met
his look calmly.
"At any rate the book is ready, which is the principal thing, I
suppose," she said.
He found himself illogically wishing she had resented it more. "It was
a mistake," he thought, "she has no feeling for him."
Through the weeks that followed they avoided mentioning his name, and
each, trusting that the other would forget, thought of him in puzzled
silence.
When he came to them next, toward the end of May, it seemed for a
moment, as he flung himself into a chair and stared moodily at the
empty fireplace, that his old self had returned. Thin and shabby, with
dark rings under his eyes, he looked like the boy Delafield had warmed
and fed that cold March night. But his words undeceived them.
"I shall shoot myself if this doesn't stop," he said bitterly. Anne
started.
"Here, here, West, none of that," the older man corrected, sharply.
"That's no thing to say--what is the matter?"
"It's Pippa," he returned, simply. "She won't marry me. I'll kill
myself if she don't. I can't eat, I can't sleep, I can't think. It
cuts into me night and day. You don't know how it kills me--you don't
know!"
He writhed like a child in physical pain. His face was distorted: he
made no more effort to conceal his misery than his delight of weeks
ago. Delafield showed a little of his disgust.
"Come, come, West," he said, "control yourself. This is no killing
matter. Better men than you have been thrown over before this. If she
won't have you, take it like a man, and get to work. It's time your
book was under way."
West stared dully at him.
"Book? book?" he repeated. "Oh, damn the book! I'd throw it away this
minute to feel her arms around me! When I think of how we used to sit
in Uncle Joseph's hammock--Oh, I can't endure it, I can't!"
He leaned his head on his arms and rocked to and fro in abject misery.
"She laughs at me--just laughs at me!" he moaned. "I'm ashamed to go
near them."
"Keep away, then," said Delafield shortly.
"I can't!" he fairly sobbed.
Anne spoke softly from a dim corner:
"Does she know about the book?"
"She doesn't care anything about it. She says I better be getting a job
somewhere. I--I would, if she'd marry me. I'd go to the drug-store!"
"Oh, no!" she breathed.
"If only she'd be engaged again," he muttered, half to himself, "I'd
finish the book, and then, perhaps----" He began to rock again. "But
she won't, she won't!" he wailed.
"If you will tell me where she lives," said Anne quietly, and as if the
conversation were to the last degree conventional, "I will go to see
her and talk the matter over. Perhaps she doesn't understand----"
"My dear Anne! Are you mad?"
As Delafield spoke, West interrupted:
"I'd rather Mr. Delafield would go," he said quickly, "if--if he would.
Maybe she'd listen to you."
"I will do nothing of the sort," Delafield returned angrily. "As if
anything I could say could compare with Miss Delafield's words! You
are an ungrateful little beast, West. A woman, like Pippa herself, is
the best person to understand the matter."
"All right," the boy assented wearily, "only she isn't like Pippa, not
a bit. Pippa's different."
Anne coloured deeply, and Delafield cursed the day he met the boy. His
niece he did not pretend to understand.
The next afternoon, as he chafed in the stuffy dining-room-parlour
of the flat that was Pippa's home, listening to the quarrelling of a
half dozen children on the dreary little roof-garden below him as to
who should swing in Uncle Joseph's hammock, he understood her less and
less. What did she expect to gain from this visit? Was she satisfying
her idea of duty or her curiosity? How much did she care, anyhow?
A steady murmur of voices came from a room behind the one he occupied.
The afternoon wore on. He began to grow sleepy.
At last the door was flung open. Anne, looking pale and tired, entered
the room, followed by a large, handsome girl with a heavy rope of
auburn hair twisted low over her forehead. She had a frank, vulgar
smile, and shallow, red-brown eyes. In her plump, large-limbed beauty
she was like a well-kept cat. The day was damp and hot, and her mussed
white shirt-waist clung to her broad curve of shoulder and breast.
In her eyes, as she smiled at him, was the quiet ease of a conscious
beauty. Beside her Anne seemed unimportant.
"I'm sorry about the book, Mr. Delafield," she said, with a slow smile.
"But I guess you don't know Henry very well if you think any reasonable
girl would think of marrying him for a minute. The gentleman I've been
keeping company with some time had a little misunderstanding with me,
and 'twas more or less to spite him, I guess, that I got engaged to
Henry. It never seemed to me it mattered much either way."
"You have broken his heart," said Delafield stiffly.
She looked vaguely at her short, fat fingers: her hands were like a
baby's in shape.
"Oh, I don't know," she said. "He's an awful unreasonable fellow,
Henry is. He gets into such tantrums--I don't dare tell him about
Mr. Winch--that's the gentleman I was speaking of. We're going to be
married in the fall. He's in a livery-stable: I guess you probably
noticed it as you came along Sixth Avenue--Judd and Winch. He's only
junior partner, but he knows as much about running a real swell funeral
as any of the uptown men--Mr. Judd says so. Henry's afraid of a horse,
you know. It don't seem quite natural for a man not to know about
horses, does it, now?"
"If you had only waited till his book came out," said Delafield
tentatively. As he looked at her he was conscious of a ridiculous
satisfaction that such a fine woman should know her own mind so
perfectly. She was a very complete creature, in her way. He realised
that in this strangely assorted quartette he and she were involuntarily
on one side of an intangible line, his niece and their unintelligible
protegé on the other.
"Wait? But I did wait. I waited over a week," she explained, "and
then I couldn't stand it any longer. He'd drive me to drink. For one
thing, Henry's changed so. When we first knew him he was really as
entertaining a gentleman as I ever saw--and I've had a great deal of
attention. Why, we'd sit around and laugh till we nearly died, he'd say
such ridiculous things. He was so different. Ma used to say if he was
much funnier she'd think he'd ought to have a keeper! The way he'd go
on----!"
Anne had turned her back and was looking steadily at the room they had
left. Pippa and Delafield might have been alone.
"But when we got engaged, he seemed to change, somehow. I don't know if
you've noticed it----"
Delafield nodded.
"Well, that's what I mean. I didn't care any more about him, then. I
guess I sort of woke up," she laughed into his eyes. "He tires me to
death with how he'll shoot himself," she added; "they always say that,
you know, but they never do."
Anne moved toward the door and Delafield followed her.
"I must say that I appreciate your position, Miss--Miss--" he stopped,
inquiringly.
"Cooley--Miss Philippa Cooley," she supplied. "Of course you do. Ma
said she hoped I'd have too much sense to stand up with a little radish
of a man like that, even if he could support me!"
"But I think it was rather hard on all of us that you should have
engaged yourself to him at all. You must have known how it would end."
He tried to speak reprovingly.
She threw him a rich glance.
"Oh, you can't help it sometimes," she murmured. "He teased so
hard--you don't want to be disagreeable. As I was telling Miss
Delafield----"
"We must go," said Anne, briefly.
As they drove home, an inexplicable desire to provoke her, to rouse
some warm feeling in her, mastered him.
"Your Aunt Ellen would enjoy this deep interest in the love affairs of
an ex-druggist's clerk and a grocer's cashier," he said lightly.
"Would she?" Anne returned quietly, and was ashamed of his freakish
impulse.
When they told him that evening that they had been able to accomplish
nothing he only stared at them gloomily.
"I knew it--I knew it," he muttered. "I did a poem last night--it's the
last I shall ever do. You can put it in the book. It's the best I've
done yet."
Delafield hardly noticed his words as he seized the poem. What if
from this sordid little tragedy had sprung the very flower of the
poet's genius? He read eagerly. In a moment his face fell. He stared
doubtfully at the boy.
"Well," said West irritably, "can't you read it? Give it here--I'll
read it to you."
"You needn't, I can read it well enough."
"What do you think of it?"
"I think it's rot," Delafield returned curtly. He was bitterly
disappointed.
"Rot?" the boy's eyes narrowed. "What d'you mean?"
"I mean that this doggerel is utterly unworthy of you, West, and that
you certainly cannot include it in your book. It is the cheapest
sentimentalism--good heavens, can't you see it? Have you no critical
faculty whatever?"
"Oh, Uncle Lester, _don't_!" Anne implored. "Let me see it," and she
put out her hand. The young man struck it away and seized the paper.
"I won't trouble you with my 'rot' any more, Mr. Delafield," he said,
with a boyish grandiloquence, "we'll see what other people have to say
about it."
"Here, West, don't go away angry!" the older man urged, "I shouldn't
have been so harsh. You've done such fine work that I couldn't bear----"
"Oh, hush your noise!" West interrupted, brutally, "neither can I bear!
You've driven me to death between you all--you'll never see me again!"
and he flung out of the room.
Delafield set his teeth. "This is too much," he said slowly. "The
vulgar little cad! No, I won't go after him, Anne; let him fume it out
himself. I'll try to ask D---- over next week, just the same."
But when Mr. D---- came over, full of pleasant anticipation, it was
only to hear of the shocking death of the boy, whose photograph, taken
from a cheap gilt locket of Pippa's, he afterward used over the popular
gift-card, "Dawn on the River."
"Couldn't even shoot himself like a gentleman," said Delafield roughly.
"Jumping seven stories--pah!"
"But the poems--the poems?" urged the publisher, "surely they----"
Anne took from the table an oblong tin biscuit-box and softly lifted
the cover.
"Here are the poems," she said, pointing to a mass of fine, grey
paper-ashes.
"He sent them to you?"
Mr. D----'s eyes lighted comprehensively; he glanced at the girl's
white face and inscrutable dark-ringed eyes with a restrained sympathy.
"He sent them to my uncle," she replied quietly.