can loose the holt o' thim twin jaws.... Beg pardon, ma'am, I know the dog."

"You mean that you have seen that dog before?"

"Yes, ma'am; he won his class from a pup at the Garden. That is 'His Highness,' ma'am, Mr. Langham's champion three-year."

She had already stooped to caress the silent, eager dog--timidly, because she had never before owned a dog--but at the mention of his master's name she drew back sharply and stood erect.

"Never fear, ma'am," said the coachman, eagerly; "he won't bite, ma'am--"

"Mr. Langham's dog?" she repeated, coldly; and then, without another glance at either the dog or the coachman, she turned to the front door; buttons swung it wide with infantile dignity; a moment later she was in her brougham, with Phelan on the box and the rigid footman expectant at the window.

II

Seated in a corner of her brougham, she saw the world pass on flashing wheels along the asphalt; she saw the April sunshine slanting across brown-stone mansions and the glass-fronted façades of shops; ... she looked without seeing.

So Langham had sent her his dog! In the first year of her widowhood she had first met Langham; she was then twenty-one. In the second year of her widowhood Langham had offered himself, and, with the declaration on his lips, had seen the utter hopelessness of his offer. They had not met since then. And now, in the third year of her widowhood, he offered her his dog!

She had at first intended to keep the dog. Knowing nothing of animals, discouraged from all sporting fads by a husband who himself was devoted to animals dedicated to sport, she had quietly acquiesced in her husband's dictum that "horse-women and dog-women made a man ill!"--and so dismissed any idea she might have entertained towards the harboring of the four-footed.

A miserable consciousness smote her: why had she allowed the memory of her husband to fade so amazingly in these last two months of early spring? Of late, when she wished to fix her thoughts upon her late husband and to conjure his face before her closed eyes, she found that the mental apparition came with more and more difficulty.

Sitting in a corner of her brougham, the sharp rhythm of her horses' hoofs tuning her thoughts, she quietly endeavored to raise that cherished mental spectre, but could not, until by hazard she remembered 

 Prev. P 13/193 next