with slipping glasses awry on his' nose, gaped at her.

"Promised!" he repeated. "That that hobo."

Mr. Baruch intervened.

"But, Selby, my friend, Miss Pilgrim is quite right. She promised;
and it is only two or three days to wait, and also it is not the only
rug in the world. Though," he added generously, "it is a nice rug
yes?"

Miss Pilgrim smiled at him gratefully; Selby shrugged, and just
caught his glasses as the shrug shook them loose.

"Fix it to suit yourselves," he snarled, and moved away toward his
untidy desk by the window.

The pale autumn sun had dissolved in watery splendors as Mr. Baruch,
with the wide astrakhan collar of his overcoat turned up about his
ears, walked easily homeward in the brisk evening chill. There were
lights along the wharves, and the broad waters of the port, along
which his road lay, were freckled with the spark-like lanterns on the
ships, each with its little shimmer of radiance reflected from the
stream. Commonly, as he strolled, he saw it all with gladness; the
world and the fullness thereof were ministers of his pleasure; but
upon this night he saw it absently, with eyes that dwelt beyond it
all. Outwardly, he was the usual Mr. Baruch; his slightly sluggish
benevolence of demeanor was unchanged as he returned the salute of a
policeman upon a corner, but inwardly he was like a man uplifted by
good news. The sense of pure beauty, buried in his being, stirred
like a rebellious slave. Those arabesques, that coloring, that
texture thrilled him like a gospel.

It was in the same mood of abstraction that he let himself into his
flat in the great German-built apartment-house that overlooked the
"boulevard" and the thronged river. He laid aside his overcoat in the
little hall, conventional with its waxed wood and its mirror, clicked
an electric-light switch and passed through a portiere into the
salon, which was the chief room of his abode. A large room, oblong
and high-ceilinged, designed by a man with palace architecture that
obsession of the Russian architect on the brain. He advanced to it,
still with that vagueness of sense, and stopped, looking round him.

It was part of the effect which Mr. Baruch made upon those who came
into contact with him that few suspected him of a home, a domesticity
of his own; he was so complete, so compactly self-contained, without
appanages of that kind. Here, however, was the frame of his real
existence, which contained it as a frame contain