usiness, his life. Every little girl, every old woman
that he passed in the street, made him think of Julia, and when he
passed a young man and woman full of concern for, and of shy pride in,
their lumpy baby in its embroidered coat, a wave of divine envy swept
Mark from head to foot.

To-day he whistled over his work, thinking of Julia. They were to meet
at three o'clock, "just to bum," as the girl said, laughing. Mark
thought that, as the season was well forward, they might take a car to
the park or the beach, but the plan had been left indefinite.

He ate his lunch, of butterless bread and sausage, and an entire
five-cent pie, in a piano wareroom, taking great bites, with dreamy
studying of the walls and long delays between. Then he wandered down
through the empty offices--it was Saturday afternoon and Pomeroy and
Parke closed promptly at twelve--had a brief chat with the Japanese
janitor, and washed his hands and combed his hair very conscientiously
in the president's own lavatory.

At half-past one he went into one of the glass showrooms, a prettily
furnished apartment whose most notable article of furniture was a grand
piano in exquisitely matched Circassian walnut. Absorbed and radiant,
Mark put back the cover, twirled the stool, and carefully opened a green
book marked "Chopin." Then he sat down, and, with the sigh of a happy
child falling upon a feast, he struck an opening chord.

The big flexible fingers still needed training, but they showed the
result of hours and hours of patient practice, too. Through his seven
years in the music house, Mark had been faithful to his gift. He made no
secret of it, his associates knew that he came back after dinner to the
very rooms that they themselves left so eagerly at the end of the day.
Mark had indeed once asked old Mr. Pomeroy to hear him play, an occasion
to which the boy still looked back with hot shame. For when his obliging
old employer had settled himself to listen after hours on an appointed
afternoon, and Mark had opened the piano, the performer suddenly found
his spine icy, his hands wet and clumsy. He felt as if he had never
touched a piano before; the attempt was a failure from the first note,
as Mark well knew. When he had finished he whisked open another book.

"That was rotten," he stammered. "I thought I could do it--I can't. But
just let me play you this--"

But the great man was in a hurry, it appeared.

"No--no, my boy, not to-day--some other t