elle in the part--"
"Is it her picture I found in your drawer the other day, Harry, cut out
from a Sunday newspaper?"
"One and the same. I been watching her. There's a world of money in that
woman, whoever she is. She's eccentric and they make her play straight, but
if I could get hold of her--My God! Millie, I--I can't believe things!"
She rose, coming round to lay her arms across his shoulders.
"We'll be rich, maybe, Harry--"
"I've picked the winners for the other fellows every time, Mil."
"Anyhow, it's worth the gamble, Harry."
"I got a nose for what the people want. I've never been able to prove it
from a high stool, but I'll show 'em now--by God! I'll show 'em now!" He
sprang up, pulling the white table-cloth awry and folding her into his
embrace. "I'll show 'em."
She leaned from him, her two hands against his chest, head thrown back and
eyes up to him.
"We--can educate our boy, then, Harry, like--like a rich man's son."
"We ain't rich yet."
"Promise me, Harry, if we are--promise me that, Harry. It's the only
promise I ask out of it. Whatever comes, if we win or lose, our boy can
have college if he wants."
He held her close, his head up and gazing beyond her.
"With a rich daddy my boy can go to college like the best of 'em."
"Promise me that, Harry."
"I promise, Millie."
He released her then, feeling for an envelope in an inner pocket, and,
standing there above the disarrayed dinner-table, executed some rapid
figures across the back of it.
She stood for a moment regarding him, hands pressed against the sting of
her cheeks, tears flowing down over her smile. Then she took up the plate
of cloying fritters and tiptoed out, opening softly the door to a slit of
a room across the hall. In the patch of light let in by that opened door,
drawn up before a small table, face toward her ravaged with recent tears,
and lips almost quivering, her son lay in the ready kind of slumber youth
can bring to any woe. She tiptoed up beside him, placing the plate of
fritters back on a pile of books, let her hands run lightly over his hair,
kissed him on each swollen lid.
"My son! My little boy! My little boy!"
Where Broadway leaves off its roof-follies and its water-dancing, its
eighty-odd theaters and its very odd Hawaiian cabarets, upper Broadway,
widening slightly, takes up its macadamized rush through the city in
block-square apartment-houses, which rise off plate-glass foundations of
the de-
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