"Don't you think you are taking a risk?"

"Every one makes mistakes now and then, and loving women have made mistakes since the world began. Most people live in gla.s.s houses, Miss Harrison. And don't make any mistake about this: people can always come back. No depth is too low. All they need is the willpower."

He smiled down at her. She had come armed with confession. But the offer he made was too alluring. It meant reinstatement, another chance, when she had thought everything was over. After all, why should she d.a.m.n herself? She would go back. She would work her finger-ends off for him.

She would make it up to him in other ways. But she could not tell him and lose everything.

"Come," he said. "Shall we go back and start over again?"

He held out his hand.

CHAPTER XXIX

Late September had come, with the Street, after its summer indolence taking up the burden of the year. At eight-thirty and at one the school bell called the children. Little girls in pig-tails, carrying freshly sharpened pencils, went primly toward the school, gathering, comet fashion, a tail of unwilling brothers as they went.

An occasional football hurtled through the air. Le Moyne had promised the baseball club a football outfit, rumor said, but would not coach them himself this year. A story was going about that Mr. Le Moyne intended to go away.

The Street had been furiously busy for a month. The cobblestones had gone, and from curb to curb stretched smooth asphalt. The fascination of writing on it with chalk still obsessed the children. Every few yards was a hop-scotch diagram. Generally speaking, too, the Street had put up new curtains, and even, here and there, had added a coat of paint.

To this general excitement the strange case of Mr. Le Moyne had added its quota. One day he was in the gas office, making out statements that were absolutely ridiculous. (What with no baking all last month, and every Sunday spent in the country, n.o.body could have used that amount of gas. They could come and take their old meter out!) And the next there was the news that Mr. Le Moyne had been only taking a holiday in the gas office,--paying off old scores, the barytone at Mrs. McKee's hazarded!--and that he was really a very great surgeon and had saved Dr.

Max Wilson.

The Street, which was busy at the time deciding whether to leave the old sidewalks or to put down cement ones, had one evening of mad excitement over the matter,--of K., not the sidewalks,--and then had accepted the new situation.

But over the news of K.'s approaching departure it mourned. What was the matter with things, anyhow? Here was Christine's marriage, which had promised so well,--awnings and palms and everything,--turning out badly.

True, Palmer Howe was doing better, but he would break out again. And Johnny Rosenfeld was dead, so that his mother came on washing-days, and brought no cheery gossip; but bent over her tubs dry-eyed and silent--even the approaching move to a larger house failed to thrill her. There was Tillie, too. But one did not speak of her. She was married now, of course; but the Street did not tolerate such a reversal of the usual processes as Tillie had indulged in. It censured Mrs. McKee severely for having been, so to speak, and accessory after the fact.

The Street made a resolve to keep K., if possible. If he had shown any "high and mightiness," as they called it, since the change in his estate, it would have let him go without protest. But when a man is the real thing,--so that the newspapers give a column to his having been in the city almost two years,--and still goes about in the same shabby clothes, with the same friendly greeting for every one, it demonstrates clearly, as the barytone put it, that "he's got no swelled head on him; that's sure."

"Anybody can see by the way he drives that machine of Wilson's that he's been used to a car--likely a foreign one. All the swells have foreign cars." Still the barytone, who was almost as fond of conversation as of what he termed "vocal." "And another thing. Do you notice the way he takes Dr. Ed around? Has him at every consultation. The old boy's tickled to death."

A little later, K., coming up the Street as he had that first day, heard the barytone singing:--

"Home is the hunter, home from the hill, And the sailor, home from sea."

Home! Why, this WAS home. The Street seemed to stretch out its arms to him. The ailanthus tree waved in the sunlight before the little house.

Tree and house were old; September had touched them. Christine sat sewing on the balcony. A boy with a piece of chalk was writing something on the new cement under the tree. He stood back, head on one side, when he had finished, and inspected his work. K. caught him up from behind, and, swinging him around--

"Hey!" he said severely. "Don't you know better than to write all over the street? What'll I do to you? Give you to a policeman?"

"Aw, lemme down, Mr. K."

"You tell the boys that if I find this street scrawled over any more, the picnic's off."

"Aw, Mr. K.!"

"I mean it. Go and spend some of that chalk energy of yours in school."

He put the boy down. There was a certain tenderness in his hands, as in his voice, when he dealt with children. All his severity did not conceal it. "Get along with you, Bill. Last bell's rung."

As the boy ran off, K.'s eye fell on what he had written on the cement.

At a certain part of his career, the child of such a neighborhood as the Street "cancels" names. It is a part of his birthright. He does it as he whittles his school desk or tries to smoke the long dried fruit of the Indian cigar tree. So K. read in chalk an the smooth street:--

Max Wilson Marriage. Sidney Page Love.

[Note: the a, l, s, and n of "Max Wilson" are crossed through, as are the S, d, n, and a of "Sidney Page"]

The childish scrawl stared up at him impudently, a sacred thing profaned by the day. K. stood and looked at it. The barytone was still singing; but now it was "I'm twenty-one, and she's eighteen." It was a cheerful air, as should be the air that had accompanied Johnny Rosenfeld to his long sleep. The light was gone from K.'s face again. After all, the Street meant for him not so much home as it meant Sidney. And now, before very long, that book of his life, like others, would have to be closed.

He turned and went heavily into the little house.

Christine called to him from her little balcony:--

"I thought I heard your step outside. Have you time to come out?"

K. went through the parlor and stood in the long window. His steady eyes looked down at her.

"I see very little of you now," she complained. And, when he did not reply immediately: "Have you made any definite plans, K.?"

"I shall do Max's work until he is able to take hold again. After that--"

"You will go away?"

"I think so. I am getting a good many letters, one way and another. I suppose, now I'm back in harness, I'll stay. My old place is closed. I'd go back there--they want me. But it seems so futile, Christine, to leave as I did, because I felt that I had no right to go on as things were; and now to crawl back on the strength of having had my hand forced, and to take up things again, not knowing that I've a bit more right to do it than when I left!"

"I went to see Max yesterday. You know what he thinks about all that."

He took an uneasy turn up and down the balcony.

"But who?" he demanded. "Who would do such a thing? I tell you, Christine, it isn't possible."

She did not pursue the subject. Her thoughts had flown ahead to the little house without K., to days without his steps on the stairs or the heavy creak of his big chair overhead as he dropped into it.

But perhaps it would be better if he went. She had her own life to live.

She had no expectation of happiness, but, somehow or other, she must build on the shaky foundation of her marriage a house of life, with resignation serving for content, perhaps with fear lurking always. That she knew. But with no active misery. Misery implied affection, and her love for Palmer was quite dead.

"Sidney will be here this afternoon."

"Good." His tone was non-committal.

"Has it occurred to you, K., that Sidney is not very happy?"

He stopped in front of her.

"She's had a great anxiety."