from his son's forehead. "He was a good boy,
Jim; always a good boy. He was ez gentle ez a child and the kindest of
'em all--only we didn't none of us ever onderstand him." The tears
trickled slowly down his beard and dropped upon the sculptor's coat.

"Martin, Martin! Oh, Martin! come here," his wife wailed from the top of
the stairs. The old man started timorously: "Yes, Annie, I'm coming." He
turned away, hesitated, stood for a moment in miserable indecision; then
reached back and patted the dead man's hair softly, and stumbled from the
room.

"Poor old man, I didn't think he had any tears left. Seems as if his eyes
would have gone dry long ago. At his age nothing cuts very deep,"
remarked the lawyer.

Something in his tone made Steavens glance up. While the mother had been
in the room, the young man had scarcely seen any one else; but now, from
the moment he first glanced into Jim Laird's florid face and blood-shot
eyes, he knew that he had found what he had been heartsick at not finding
before--the feeling, the understanding, that must exist in some one, even
here.

The man was red as his beard, with features swollen and blurred by
dissipation, and a hot, blazing blue eye. His face was strained--that
of a man who is controlling himself with difficulty--and he kept plucking
at his beard with a sort of fierce resentment. Steavens, sitting by the
window, watched him turn down the glaring lamp, still its jangling
pendants with an angry gesture, and then stand with his hands locked
behind him, staring down into the master's face. He could not help
wondering what link there had been between the porcelain vessel and so
sooty a lump of potter's clay.

From the kitchen an uproar was sounding; when the dining-room door
opened, the import of it was clear. The mother was abusing the maid for
having forgotten to make the dressing for the chicken salad which had
been prepared for the watchers. Steavens had never heard anything in
the least like it; it was injured, emotional, dramatic abuse, unique and
masterly in its excruciating cruelty, as violent and unrestrained as had
been her grief of twenty minutes before. With a shudder of disgust the
lawyer went into the dining-room and closed the door into the kitchen.

"Poor Roxy's getting it now," he remarked when he came back. "The
Merricks took her out of the poor-house years ago; and if her loyalty
would let her, I guess the poor old thing could tell tales that would
curdle