It was late when K. Le Moyne retired to bed.
Wrapped in a paper and securely tied for the morning’s
disposal, was considerable masculine underclothing,
ragged and buttonless. Not for worlds would he
have had Sidney discover his threadbare inner condition.
“New underwear for yours tomorrow, K. Le Moyne,”
he said to himself, as he unknotted his cravat.
“New underwear, and something besides K. for
a first name.”
He pondered over that for a time, taking off his shoes
slowly and thinking hard. “Kenneth, King,
Kerr—” None of them appealed to him.
And, after all, what did it matter? The old
heaviness came over him.
He dropped a shoe, and Reginald, who had gained enough
courage to emerge and sit upright on the fender, fell
over backward.
Sidney did not sleep much that night. She lay
awake, gazing into the scented darkness, her arms
under her head. Love had come into her life at
last. A man—only Joe, of course, but
it was not the boy himself, but what he stood for,
that thrilled her had asked her to be his wife.
In her little back room, with the sweetness of the
tree blossoms stealing through the open window, Sidney
faced the great mystery of life and love, and flung
out warm young arms. Joe would be thinking of
her now, as she thought of him. Or would he
have gone to sleep, secure in her half promise?
Did he really love her?
The desire to be loved! There was coming to
Sidney a time when love would mean, not receiving,
but giving—the divine fire instead of the
pale flame of youth. At last she slept.
A night breeze came through the windows and spread
coolness through the little house. The ailanthus
tree waved in the moonlight and sent sprawling shadows
over the wall of K. Le Moyne’s bedroom.
In the yard the leaves of the morning-glory vines
quivered as if under the touch of a friendly hand.
K. Le Moyne slept diagonally in his bed, being very
long. In sleep the lines were smoothed out of
his face. He looked like a tired, overgrown
boy. And while he slept the ground-squirrel ravaged
the pockets of his shabby coat.
Sidney could not remember when her Aunt Harriet had
not sat at the table. It was one of her earliest
disillusionments to learn that Aunt Harriet lived
with them, not because she wished to, but because Sidney’s
father had borrowed her small patrimony and she was
“boarding it out.” Eighteen years
she had “boarded it out.” Sidney had
been born and grown to girlhood; the dreamer father
had gone to his grave, with valuable patents lost for
lack of money to renew them—gone with his
faith in himself destroyed, but with his faith in
the world undiminished: for he left his wife and
daughter without a dollar of life insurance.
Harriet Kennedy had voiced her own view of the matter,
the after the funeral, to one of the neighbors:—
