They came out and had him inside very promptly.  And there was one who made herself a pillow for his head, and cared for no curious eyes, bending over and saying, “Oh, it was you; it was you all the time, Bobby!  Couldn’t you see it?  And if you die, why, so must I, and—­”

But in all this wind we must hurry to keep in touch with our paper.

Policeman O’Brine arrested it as a character dangerous to traffic.  Straightening its dishevelled leaves with his big, slow fingers, he stood a few feet from the family entrance of the Shandon Bells Cafe.  One headline he spelled out ponderously:  “The Papers to the Front in a Move to Help the Police.”

But, whisht!  The voice of Danny, the head bartender, through the crack of the door:  “Here’s a nip for ye, Mike, ould man.”

Behind the widespread, amicable columns of the press Policeman O’Brine receives swiftly his nip of the real stuff.  He moves away, stalwart, refreshed, fortified, to his duties.  Might not the editor man view with pride the early, the spiritual, the literal fruit that had blessed his labours.

Policeman O’Brine folded the paper and poked it playfully under the arm of a small boy that was passing.  That boy was named Johnny, and he took the paper home with him.  His sister was named Gladys, and she had written to the beauty editor of the paper asking for the practicable touchstone of beauty.  That was weeks ago, and she had ceased to look for an answer.  Gladys was a pale girl, with dull eyes and a discontented expression.  She was dressing to go up to the avenue to get some braid.  Beneath her skirt she pinned two leaves of the paper Johnny had brought.  When she walked the rustling sound was an exact imitation of the real thing.

On the street she met the Brown girl from the flat below and stopped to talk.  The Brown girl turned green.  Only silk at $5 a yard could make the sound that she heard when Gladys moved.  The Brown girl, consumed by jealousy, said something spiteful and went her way, with pinched lips.

Gladys proceeded toward the avenue.  Her eyes now sparkled like jagerfonteins.  A rosy bloom visited her cheeks; a triumphant, subtle, vivifying, smile transfigured her face.  She was beautiful.  Could the beauty editor have seen her then!  There was something in her answer in the paper, I believe, about cultivating kind feelings toward others in order to make plain features attractive.

The labour leader against whom the paper’s solemn and weighty editorial injunction was laid was the father of Gladys and Johnny.  He picked up the remains of the journal from which Gladys had ravished a cosmetic of silken sounds.  The editorial did not come under his eye, but instead it was greeted by one of those ingenious and specious puzzle problems that enthrall alike the simpleton and the sage.

The labour leader tore off half of the page, provided himself with table, pencil and paper and glued himself to his puzzle.