Tossing a half-dollar, which the girl, long-practised, caught with a deft flip of the tambourine, he turned and strode off across the little common, still unnaturally elated with his joke on Elinor. He mounted the Coolidge steps at an unheard-of pace, agitated the massive knocker, and, a maid appearing after an interval, demanded the mistress of the house.

The maid did not answer with her customary promptness. A servant of long standing, she had gotten the figure of Dana Peabody inextricably connected in her simple mind with a Tuesday or a Friday afternoon, and his appearance at this time, with a street-organ wailing a haggard "Tipperary" to the night behind him, was out of the ordinary, to say the best of it.

"Miss Coolidge is-is dining out," she murmured, closing the door a shade and keeping track of him with alert eyes. He muttered something in the nature of a "Hang take it!" and stood for a moment undecided and exasperated.

"When do you expect her back?" he asked.

"Not till late, I am afraid, sir. There is the symphony concert." "Oh, I had forgotten. day, is n't it?"

This is SaturThis is Satur

He had never been so keenly disappointed in his life, perhaps because he had never before suffered that poignant insanity, a fixed idea. Turning on the steps, his eyes went down to the shadowy group at the edge of the sidewalk, making its tumult patiently until such time as he bade it stop.

And this time the indefatigable tambourine discovered paper-money in the air.

The old man, surrounded by a world at all times largely inexplicable, bent patiently to his traces and regarded the miracle of the earth passing rearward beneath his feet. Nor was the girl, who had looked in a mirror more than once, at a loss for a simple explanation; and when they had come to the lamp at the corner, smiled at the gentleman on the sidewalk with such a red-lipped, brighteyes understanding that he got in an extra step, and performed that essentially masculine act of running a finger around the inner edge of his collar.

"I say!" he gasped, rather off his balance. "This is-this is!"

He went along a little faster, with a vague feeling of consternation.

They managed to get out of the residential streets and into the Narrow Fens, taking the bridge over the railway, like one of those mountain-batteries one hears of, doing desperate feats. And after that there was a long, winding lane, soggy underfoot, dripping overhead from the maples and yellow birches. A bridle-path came out of the nicely kept wilderness, and went over them on a stone bridge, and here under the shadowy arch his charges halted, their sharp, practised eyes having picked up a policeman in a blotch of light ahead.

"Oh, come now," he protested, crouching down a little in the shadow, "whawhat of it?"

The girl's warm, wet hand touched his in a guarded search. "We alla right here?

"I-I can't say."

Getta pinch'

Simple creature, she had never before walked in the Narrow Fens. More-thansimple Dana Peabody, he had never before walked in the Narrow Fens-with a barrel-organ.

"But I know another way round," he whispered after a moment.

So they came successfully into the Broad Fens by a detour, and Dana, paus

He got his hat on awkwardly, leaving it tilted an accidental degree, so that it gave him the expression of an old rake who knows his business.

"You may-ah-go on," he said. And as he watched her moving off, tossing irrepressible shoulders, graceful, passionately healthy, he muttered to himself: "A pretty mess, Dana! A pretty mess!"

They crawled across the Broad Fens, broader than ever to-night in the drizzling air; so broad indeed that all those shadowy surrounding institutions seemed to have lost substance and mattered scarcely at all. Ingenious pools passed them by, reflecting park lamps untidily, and now and then, against one of these, the shape of a very, very thin dog was visible, running swiftly, with his tail tucked between his legs-a sort of phantom dog, doomed to flee eternally before the ghost of a boot.

Immensity gave them up through massive gates into a city street full of cabs and motors and belated delivery-wagons. The old man moved stolidly with the current, secure in his infirmity, and the girl, appearing to know by instinct when danger threatened, guided him with occasional light nudgings, her eyes, from long habit, questioning the house-tops.

"Mister," she called to Dana, "you better go sida-walk, yes? You getta hurt, maybe."

He was struck by the soundness of her advice, and turning directly into the path. of a rapidly moving laundry wagon, discovered himself sitting on the curb, bruised and shaken. He wondered in a giddy way why the driver was so angry with him, conceiving that it ought, logically, to be the other way around, and he discovered an unprecedented glow of gratitude when the girl, giving over her

war with the waning teamster, came running to help him up with her strong arms, to rescue his hat, damaged, but still seaworthy, from the bosom of the gutter, and restore it to his head, exclaiming over him all the time with a kind of ferocious tenderness.

"I don't care," he mumbled idiotically, wiping a cut cheek with the back of his wrist. "You 're-you 're a good sort."

Moving forward once more, they turned a corner, and found themselves in the hurly-burly of cabs and motors about the symphony, and Dana nodded at a momentary opening beside the curb. The look the girl cast at him was dubious; nevertheless, she prodded her father into the gap, and the old man, observing that the earth had come once more to a standstill, lifted his hand mechanically to the crank and ground.

Of course there was immediate trouble. Cabmen swore, offered to knock the old man down, and bawled loudly for the starter; but the starter was off just then on the avenue side and could not hear. Richly gowned women and their escorts, crossing the sidewalk under the broad glass awning, turned faces, anguished or supercilious, and made haste up the steps. And the organ sang, "Love Me, and the World is Mine," with cymbals and drum; sang with a horrible ecstasy, faster and ever faster, for that two-legged clod behind it, discovering the Pavlowa poised, all red and white, on a poster, conceived dimly that one was dancing beyond. that blank, brick wall, and was glad. And through all this distressful comedy Dana Peabody stood and stared at the swinging doors, the brow beneath the brim of his battered hat furrowed with a courteous perplexity. For the life of him he could not remember clearly why he had come here. Somewhere between Brookline and Massachusetts Avenue he had lost the point of the joke.

A hand on his shoulder startled him. Wheeling, he found himself face to face with Reggie Howe and Seward, immaculate Seward, of Seward & Jenkins, the Peabody bankers for generations.

1?" They smiled and nodded in unison, exchanging quick glances.

"Now here's the taxi right over here," Seward explained confidentially. "Just a step, old man."

"Taxi? I don't-I 'm afraid I don't quite understand."

The older man looked him over with a kind of tolerant impatience. There was more than one ne'er-do-weel among the younger clientele of Seward & Jenkins, though he had never suspected Dana Peabody before.

"You wanted to go home, old chap," he suggested severely. "Don't you remember? You wanted to go home."

Dana lifted his eyebrows politely.

"I beg your pardon. I recall just now that I wanted to see Elinor Coolidge. You have n't noticed her going in, either of you? We happened to be discussing something this afternoon, and I wanted. her to see these-ah-friends of mine." He turned with a new-come devil of perversity stirring in him, and pressed a palm against a booming membrane. "It's not -not so bad-is it?-when we eliminate the drum part."

"Look here, old fellow," Reggie Howe spoke jovially in his ear, "let 's jump into this taxi and go find Elinor, all together. What do you say?" And then, in a venomous aside to the mistress of the barrel-organ: "And you may clear out of here before I have you picked up and thrown out. Yes, I mean you!"

"Oh, I say! I say!" Dana watched the flaming resentment die out of the girl's eyes, giving place slowly to a kind of hackneyed hopelessness, as though she had remembered herself. "Don't be a blackguard, Reggie. I-I won't have it."

With a sudden clarity of suspicion, he turned to look about him.

"Oh, come now," he protested, "they ought not to laugh at these people like that. They don't understand. They don't under-" The Malacca stick clattered carelessly on the stones. Wheeling, Dana put his shoulder to the barrel-organ, cry

Hurry now!" He had an awful feeling that if Elinor Coolidge, getting out of her car just over there, were to catch sight of this gaudy machine, with its dumb old man and its girl in the ragged yellow shawl, she would laugh or at the least smile, and that would not do. That, of a sudden, would not do at all.

The vehicle, hustled into unusual motion, burst through a bedlam of cabwheels into the open street, bumped across a double pair of car-tracks and, lumbering heavily like a hen with strange chicks, found the mouth of an alley. Not till they had rumbled half a block along this gloomy passage did the girl hold back a little, lifting questioning eyes.

"Where we go to now, Mister?" "Anywhere! Anywhere but here!" He halted, breathing deeply with his exertions, stupefied by events, bewildered by back yards. The girl, who had never for an instant doubted some definite, if unknowable, design in this bizarre undertaking, stared at him, appalled. He stared back at her, helpless.

"You no know?" she marveled.

And now the old grinder, sensing by some obscure intelligence that authority had failed, put his weight into the traces and started off, his eyes no longer perusing the pavement, but fixed ahead with an odd gleam of purpose in them. Having no purpose of their own, the others followed.

In the course of the next half-hour, Dana Peabody became acquainted with many things he had never known before. He had dealings with ash-cans, which struck at him out of the night; cats in catland vanished screeching from underfoot; and the spontaneous talk of kitchens, heard occasionally in his own house, far off and rumorous through swinging-doors, circulated freely above his head. The old man increased his pace by degrees, sloughing off his heavy habit, taking on almost a kind of youth. Never for an instant at a loss, he led them through the familiar thoroughfares of the lowly with a remarkable directness. Now and then their

path led across bright streets or over recognizable bridges, and more than one blue-coated officer, struck by the apparition of a singularly battered gentleman trailing a street-organ into an alley, puckered his brow and remembered the circumstance later.

Once the girl, whose alert eyes never ceased roving, hissed furtively, laid a finger over her lips, and disappeared through an unlatched gate. She returned a moment later with a hot apple-pie, filched from a window-sill, and breaking a piece of it out of the plate with her fingers, held it up to him with so frank a gesture of pleasure that he quite forgot to refuse it. He even ate it, untidily, having discovered just here the new emotion of hunger.

Beneath the next alley-lamp he turned a curiously rosy face.

"I-I wonder," he hesitated, "if you would tell me your name."

"Ai! You wanta know!" For all the banter, there was color in her own face

a rich, victorious color. She dropped her eyes, pursed her heavy, red lips as though deliberating, and rolled an idle pebble under her toe.

"Yes," he said, with an unwonted energy, "I do."

"Ai! Ai! I no tella you," she laughed, wise in the great fundamentals. Retreating a step, she watched him in mock alarm, bright-eyed, provokingly breathless. "No, I scared for you. It is mucha mans veree sweet on me-badda mansselvagi touti! Gotta knifes. Oh, no, no!"

"Really!" The challenge in it had passed quite over his head. "I'm sorry you feel that way about it. I'm sure I meant no harm." He walked on, covering his disappointment under a slight hauteur. He had not gone a dozen steps when a warm, relenting hand was in his.

"You gotta mad, yes?" she questioned impetuously, looking up into his oddly working face.

"No. No, indeed. You 're a strange sort of person. You make me feel as