The firemen stood out against the brightness like shining black beetles in their wet rubber coats and helmets. The faces of the crowd lit up fearfully with rugged, tense lines and deep shadows. Even the children seemed old and sad in the lurid light. One little toddler fell down and was almost crushed beneath the feet of the crowd as a detachment of firemen turned with their hose to run to another spot farther up the street where fire had just broken out. The air was dense with shouts and curses. Women screamed, and men hurried out of the ramshackle houses bearing bits of furniture. Just a fire. Just an ordinary fire. Thousands of them happening all over the land every day. Nothing in it at all compared to the terror of the war. Yet there was a tang in the air, a stir in the pulses that made Patterson thrill like a boy to the excitement of it. He wondered at himself as he dived to pick up the fallen child and found his young companion had been more agile. The toddler was restored to her mother before her first outcry had fully left her lips.

“Good work, Blink!” commended a fireman with face blackened beyond recognition and a form draped in a dripping coat.

“That’s the minister!” breathed the boy in Patterson Greeves’s ear and darted off to pounce upon a young bully who was struggling with his baby sister for possession of some household treasures.

Then, as quickly as it had begun, the fire was gone, the homeless families parceled out among their neighbors, the bits of furniture safely disposed of for the night, and the firemen getting ready to depart.

“Ain’t you goin’ to drive her back?” the boy asked the tall figure standing beside him.

Patterson Greeves warmed to the voice that replied:

“No, son, I’m going back across the fields with you if you don’t mind. I want to get quiet under the stars before I sleep, after all this crash.”

They tramped through the field together, the three, and there was an air of congeniality from the start as of long friendship. The boy was quiet and grave as if bringing his intelligence up to the honored standard of his friend, and the new man was accepted as naturally as the grass they walked upon or a new star in the sky. There was no introduction. They just began. They were talking about the rotten condition of the homes that had just burned and the rottener condition of the men’s minds who were the workers in the industries in Frogtown. The minister said it was the natural outcome of conditions after the war, and it was going to be worse before it was better, but it was going to be better before a fatal climax came, and the scientist put in a word about conditions abroad.

When they had crossed the final fence and stood in the village street once more, Patterson Greeves waved his hand toward the house and said: “You’re coming in for a cup of coffee with me,” and his tone included the boy cordially.

They went in quite as naturally as if they had been doing it often, and the minister as he laid aside his rubber coat and helmet remarked with a genial smile: “I thought it must be you when I first saw you at the Flats. They told me you were coming home. I’m glad I lost no time in making your acquaintance!”

Blink stuffed his old grimy cap in his hip pocket and glowed with pride as he watched the two men shake hands with the real hearty handclasp that denotes liking on both sides.

The old servants joyfully responded to the call for coffee and speedily brought a fine old silver tray with delicate Sèvres cups and rare silver service, plates of hastily made sandwiches—pink with wafer-thin slices of sweetbriar ham—more plates of delicate filled cookies, crumby with nuts and raisins. Blink ate and ate again and gloried in the feast, basking in the geniality of the two men, his special particular “finds” in the way of companions. “Gee! It was great!” He wouldn’t mind a fire every night!

The coffee cups were empty, and the two men were deep in a discussion of industrial conditions in foreign lands when suddenly, with sharp insistence, the telephone rang out and startled into the conversation. With a frown of annoyance Patterson Greeves finished his sentence and turned to take the receiver.

“Western Union. Telegram for Patterson Greeves!” The words cut across his consciousness and jerked him back into his own troubled life. “Yes?” he breathed sharply.

“Too late! Athalie already on her way. She should reach you tomorrow morning.”

Signed “Lilla.”

It seemed to him as he hung up the receiver, a dazed, baffled look upon his face, that he could hear Lilla’s mocking laughter ringing out somewhere in the distance. Again she had outwitted him!

Chapter 3

Having diligently inquired what time the night express from the East reached the nearby city, and finding that it was scheduled to arrive fifteen minutes after the early morning train left for Silver Sands and that there was not another local train that could bring his unwelcome daughter before eleven o’clock, Patterson Greeves ate his carefully prepared breakfast with a degree of comfort and lingered over his morning paper.

He had in a long-distance call for the principal of a well-known and exclusive girls’ school in New England, and he was quite prepared to take the child there at once without even bringing her to the house. He had already secured by telephone the service of an automobile to take them at once back to the city, that she might be placed on the first train possible for Boston. It only remained to arrange the preliminaries with the principal, who was well known to him.