e him and tell him; he had appeared of
late so down.

"Oh, I remember him"--Mark didn't repudiate the friendship, placing him
easily; only then he wasn't married and the pretty girl's sister must
have come in later: which showed, his not knowing such things, how they
had lost touch. The pretty girl was sorry to have to say in return to
this that her sister wasn't living--had died two years after marrying;
so that Newton was up there in Fiftieth Street alone; where (in
explanation of his being "down") he had been shut up for days with bad
_grippe_; though now on the mend, or she wouldn't have gone to him, not
she, who had had it nineteen times and didn't want to have it again. But
the horrid poison just seemed to have entered into poor Newton's soul.

"That's the way it _can_ take you, don't you know?" And then as, with
her single twist, she just charmingly hunched her eyes at our friend,
"Don't you want to go to see him?"

Mark bethought himself: "Well, I'm going to see a lady-----"

She took the words from his mouth. "Of course you're going to see a
lady--every man in New York is. But Newton isn't a lady, unfortunately
for him, to-day; and Sunday afternoon in this place, in this weather,
alone-----!"

"Yes, isn't it awful?"--he was quite drawn to her.

"Oh, _you've_ got your lady!"

"Yes, I've got my lady, thank goodness!" The fervour of which was his
sincere tribute to the note he had had on Friday morning from Mrs. Ash,
the only thing that had a little tempered his gloom.

"Well then, feel for others. Fit him in. Tell him why!"

"Why I've come back? I'm glad I _have_--since it was to see _you_!"
Monteith made brave enough answer, promising to do what he could.
He liked the pretty girl, with her straight attack and her free
awkwardness--also with her difference from the others through something
of a sense and a distinction given her by so clearly having Newton on
her mind. Yet it was odd to him, and it showed the lapse of the years,
that Winch--as he had known him of old--could _be_ to that degree on any
one's mind.

III

Outside in the intensity of the cold--it was a jump from the Tropics to
the Pole--he felt afresh the force of what he had just been saying;
that if it weren't for the fact of Mrs. Ash's good letter of welcome,
despatched, characteristically, as soon as she had, like the faithful
sufferer in Fiftieth Street, observed his name, in a newspaper, on one
of the hotel-lists, he should ve