ear
caught every tick of the clock, which seemed to his exaggerated fancy
to have retarded its movement. He found it so impossible to work at
his office that he packed up his papers and started for home.

"What! going so early?" called Brooke from his desk.

"Yes, a man cannot do any work here with this everlasting steam-drill
outside."

"You are growing too sensitive for this world, Flint. We shall have to
build you a padded room, like Carlyle's, on top of the building."

Flint vouchsafed no answer. He posted out and up Broadway as if he
were in mad haste. Then suddenly recollecting that his chief purpose
was to kill time, he moderated his stramming gait to a stroll. At a
jeweller's on Union Square he paused, and turned in, ostensibly to
order some cards; but passing out he stopped surreptitiously before
the case of jewels. The rubies interested him most. How well they
would look against a certain gray-silk gown! Should he ever dare-- He
caught a meaning smile on the face of the clerk, and bolted out of the
door.

He paused again at a fashionable florist's shop tucked deftly in among
the theatres of central Broadway. The men at the counter were busily
engaged over curiously incongruous tasks,--one binding up a cross of
lilies, another a wreath for a baby's coffin, and a third preparing a
beribboned basket, gay with chrysanthemums, for a dinner-table.
Heedless, like us all, of every one's experiences but his own, Flint
stood by, waiting impatiently for the clerk who was putting the last
lily in the cross. From the great heaps of roses which stood about he
selected an overflowing boxful of the longest-stemmed and most
fragrant. The clerk smiled as he watched his recklessness. "I've seen
'em like that," he said to himself, "and two or three years after
they'll come in and ask for carnations, and say it doesn't matter if
they _were_ brought in yesterday."

Unconscious of the florist's cynical reflections, Flint tossed him
his card, and emerged once more to add one to the moving mass of
humanity on the street. At Madison Square he dropped in at the club
and looked over the latest numbers of "Life" and "Punch."

Still time hung heavy on his hands. He looked at his watch; it was
just five o'clock,--exactly the time when that objectionable Blathwayt
was to call in Stuyvesant Square. Still two hours before dinner.

He left the club, crossed over to Broadway, and jumped onto the
platform of the moving cable-car at immi