ROUND THE CORNER IN GAY STREET.

by Grace S. Richmond.

BOOK I. GAY STREET

CHAPTER I

AN INTRODUCTION BY TELEPHONE

The hour for breakfast at the home of Mr. Harrison Townsend, in Worthington Square, was supposed to be eight o'clock. In point of fact, however, breakfast was usually served from that hour on, until the last laggard had appeared.

The head of the house himself was always promptly on hand at eight. On the morning of April second he had, as usual, nearly finished his breakfast before the door opened to admit a second member of the family.

Mr. Townsend raised his eyes as a tall and slender figure limped slowly across the floor.

"Morning, Murray!" he said, and dropped his eyes again to his paper.

"Good morning, sir!" responded his son, and glanced indifferently over the table as he sat down. "Bring me grapefruit and a cup of coffee," he said to the maid. "No, nothing else. Be sure the grapefruit is fixed as I like it."

Mr. Townsend finished his newspaper and his coffee at the same moment, and rose from the table. Although five minutes had elapsed since the elder of his two sons came into the room, no conversation had pa.s.sed between them. Mr. Townsend's glance dropped upon the young man, who, with his look of ill health, would have appeared to a stranger to have lived several more than the twenty-three years which were really his.

"You're not feeling well this morning, Murray?"

"About as usual."

"It's not strange that you have no strength, when you take nothing substantial with your morning meal."

"How can I, when I can't bear the sight of anything but fruit?"

"You don't get out enough."

"I suppose I don't. There's nothing to take me out."

Mr. Townsend turned away. As he pa.s.sed through the door, he met his daughter Olive, and greeted her.

This very pretty, dark-skinned, dark-eyed girl of eighteen evidently had been keeping late hours on the previous evening. Her long lashes drooped sleepily over her eyes as she nodded to her brother.

"Grapefruit any good?" she asked.

"Fair, if it wasn't sweetened like a bonbon."

"I like mine sweet. Annie, tell Gretchen to put half a dozen maraschino cherries in my grapefruit and some crushed ice."

"You must like the mess that will be," Murray observed.

"I do--very much," replied his sister, decidedly.

The two continued their breakfast in silence, which was presently interrupted by the advent of a fourth member of the family. Forrest Townsend, flinging into the room with a rush, dressed in riding clothes, and casting hat and crop upon a chair as he pa.s.sed it, offered a picturesque contrast to the two dark-eyed young persons. Of a little more than medium height, strongly built, fair-haired and blue-eyed, he looked the young athlete that he was.

"h.e.l.lo!" was his morning greeting, as he dropped into a chair. He proceeded instantly to give his directions to the maid. No invalid order was his.

"No--no grapefruit. I want my chop, and some bacon and eggs; tell Gretchen to brown the eggs better than she did yesterday. m.u.f.fins this morning? What? Oh bother! You know I hate toast, Annie! Oh, waffles--that's better! Coffee, of course."

"Sounds like an order you 'd give at a hotel," observed his sister, with scorn. "I wonder Gretchen does n't make a fuss at having to cook a whole breakfast like that just for you. n.o.body else wants such a heavy meal at this hour."

"The bigger geese you all are then. If I picked at my breakfast the way the rest of you do, I 'd soon lose this good muscle and wind of mine."

"I never heard that hot waffles and syrup were good for muscle and wind." Murray looked cynical under his dark eyebrows. "They would n't be allowed at any training-table."

Forrest leaned back in his chair and surveyed his brother. "A lot you know about training tables--a fellow who spent his two college years cramming for honours," he said, pointedly. "No wonder you look like a pale ghost on such rations. Here comes mother at last."

Mrs. Harrison Townsend, in a trailing pale blue gown, her fair hair piled high upon her head, came in with an air of abstraction.

"Out late last night?" Forrest asked her, attacking his chop with relish. "A dissipated lot you all look but me. Even Murray would be taken for a chap that got in toward morning. That comes of reading in bed. Now look at me. I was in after the last of you, and I 'm as fresh as a daisy."

"For a boy not out of his teens your hours strike me as peculiar."

Murray rose slowly as he spoke. He glanced at his mother. She was busy with letters she had found at her plate.

Murray limped slowly over to the end of the room, where a great semi-circular alcove, filled with windows, a cushioned seat running round its whole extent, looked out upon the shrubbery and the street beyond. He sank down upon this seat, and gazed indifferently out of the window.

Across the narrow side street which led away from stately Worthington Square into a much less pretentious neighborhood stood a big furniture van, unloading its contents before a small brown house. Although upon the left side of the Townsend place lay a fine stretch of lawn, at the right the house stood not more than ten yards away from the side street.

Its present owner had attempted to remedy this misfortune of site by planting a thick hedge and much shrubbery, but a narrow vista remained through which, from the dining-room windows, the little brown house opposite could be seen with the effect of being viewed through a field-gla.s.s and brought into close range.

"What's that over there in Gay Street?" Olive had caught a glimpse of the furniture-van. "New people moving in? Goodness! How many tenants has that house had? They 're always moving out and moving in--n.o.body can keep track of them."

Mrs. Townsend, looking up from her letter, glanced out in her turn.

"There is certainly no need to keep track of them," she observed. "What your Grandfather Townsend could have been thinking of when he built this house on the very edge of such a fine lot----"

"Grandfather Townsend was a shrewd old man, and had an eye to the sale of lots on the farther side of the house when land got high here," was Forrest's explanation.

Five minutes later he was out of the house and crossing the lawn to the stables--a gay and gallant young figure in his riding clothes. From the window of his own room upstairs Murray watched his brother go, feeling bitterly, as he often did, the contrast between Forrest's superb young health and his own crippled condition, the result of an accident two years before, and the illness which had followed it.

"Don't get outdoors enough!" he said to himself. "I fancy if I could go tearing out of the house like that every morning, jump on Bluebottle, and gallop off down Frankfort Boulevard I could get outdoor air enough to keep me healthy."

An hour afterward there was a knock at his door, and a child's voice called: "O Murray, may I come in?"

His thirteen-year-old sister Shirley somehow seemed nearer to Murray than any other member of his family. "Come in!" he responded.

"O Murray," the little sister began instantly, "some new people are moving into the little brown house, and there 's a girl just my age! She looks so nice! I 've been watching her. She 's helping wash windows.

Oh, please come into the den and let me show you!"

From the 'den' it could all be seen. There were two girls on the small porch, each washing a window. The elder girl looked as if she were about eighteen, her abundant curly hair, of a decided reddish brown, being worn low at her neck after the fashion of girls of that age. Even across the street the observers could see that she had a merry face, full of life and colour.

The younger girl, was about Shirley's size, round-faced and st.u.r.dy, and apparently of an amiable frame of mind, for having accidentally tipped over her pail, she took the mishap in the jolliest spirit, and throwing back her thick brown braids of hair, mopped up the swimming porch with lively flourishes.

"I wish we could see 'em closer," suggested Shirley. "They look so nice--don't you think they do?--not a bit like the other people that have lived in that house. I saw their mother, I 'm sure I did, a little while ago--she had the dearest face! Murray, don't you think you 'd like to take a little walk? It would be such fun to go past the house while they 're out there, and they 'd be sure to turn and look, so we could see their faces. Please, Murray! We may not have so good a chance after they get the windows washed."