n sleep of the man
and woman whose days are filled with cares, and under whose roof at
night children and servants slumber aloof secure.

While these two troubled spirits found repose and renewal, locked each
in the other's arms, the blackness was gradually withdrawn from the air.
In the sky there came a pallor that grew to a twilight and became a
radiance and a splendor. And night was day. It would soon be time for
the father to rise and go forth to his work, and for the mother to rise
to the offices of the home.

THE MAN THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

I

In the tame little town of Hillsdale he seemed the tamest thing of all,
Will Rudd--especially appropriate to a kneeling trade, a shoe clerk by
election. He bent the pregnant hinges to anybody soever that entered the
shop, with its ingenious rebus on the sign-board:

[Illustration: CLAY KITTREDGE and Emporium Nobby Footwear]

He not only untied the stilted Oxfords or buttoned in the arching
insteps of those who sat in the "Ladies' and Misses' Dept.," which was
the other side of the double-backed bench whose obverse was the "Gents'
Dept.," but also he took upon the glistening surface of his trousers the
muddy soles of merchants, the clay-bronzed brogans of hired men, the
cowhide toboggans of teamsters, and the brass-toed, red-kneed boots of
little boys ecstatic in their first feel of big leather.

Rudd was a shoe clerk to be trusted. He never revealed to a soul that
Miss Clara Lommel wore shoes two sizes too small, and when she bit her
lip and blenched with agony as he pried her heel into the protesting
dongola, he seemed not to notice that she was no Cinderella.

And one day, when it was too late, and Miss Lucy Posnett, whose people
lived in the big brick mansard, realized that she had a hole in her
stocking, what did Rudd do? Why, he never let on.

Stanch Methodist that he was, William Rudd stifled _in petto_ the fact
that the United Presbyterian parson's wife was vain and bought little,
soft black kids with the Cuban heel and a patent-leather tip to the
opera toe! The United Presbyterian parson himself had salved his own
vanity by saying that shoes show so plainly on the pulpit, and it was
better to buy them a trifle too small than a trifle too large,
but--umm!--er, hadn't you better put in a little more of that powder,
Mr. Rudd? I have on--whew!--unusually thick socks to-day.

Clay Kittredge, Rudd's employer, valued him, secretly, as a man who
brought in