alarm. “How’s the old scow to-night, mate?”

“Why, most surprisin’ well—yassah, most surprisin’.”

“It’s a stormy night, and there’s a bad reef above the fourth. Well, mate, we’re in the hands of Providence. It’s will be done!”

All at once, seeming to perceive King O’Leary for the first time, he inquired anxiously:

“Excuse me, sir, does my presence at the helm cause you any anxiety?”

“Not here,” said King O’Leary, who, in his amusement, had been tricked out of his glumness.

“What floor can I serve you, sir?”

“The sixth will be about right for me.”

“Then we sink or swim, survive or perish, together!”

He was dapperly dressed, and though his yellowish checks were evidently ready-made, they were squeezed in at the waist and hoisted over the ankles in the latest style. He had the hatchet face of the clever Yankee, alert, sharply defined, with a high-bridged and rather bold English nose.

“Youngster looks like a pocket edition of the Duke of Wellington,” thought King O’Leary, registering his favorable impressions, and, before the other’s infectious spirits, he began to recover his natural zest.

Tootles—to give Mr. St. George Kidder at once his workaday name—meanwhile had been examining his companion with the impressionable eye of the artist. He saw the bulky body of a man approaching middle age, yet full of rough, brawny substance and weather-tried endurance. The great half-moon of a mouth was now turning up in its usual indomitable attitude toward life under the broad-spaced, jovial nose set between full cheeks breaking into dimples. Underneath wisps of tawny hair, rather Mephistophelian, were clear-blue eyes, brilliant and sharp as a brigand’s. The whole had a combination of companionable good humor, and instant aggression when necessary.

“Rather a rough nun in case of a scrap, I should fancy,” thought Tootles, who had his own way of expressing things. “However, he has a sense of humor—of my humor—which is distinctly in his favor.”

Suddenly he exclaimed aloud:

“Whoa there! All hands on deck stand by the lifeboats!”

The elevator, having drifted gradually past one dark floor after the other, had now come to a jolting stop between the third and the fourth, and began to churn up and down in a manner distinctly alarming.

“Sassafras, you’re feeding Tessie too much red meat,” said Tootles, shifting his metaphors as Sam came to the rescue.

Another moment of joggling and bucking, and the elevator, as though too weary to continue its exertions, suddenly glided up and to a rest at the sixth floor.

“Whew! My eyes and whiskers!” exclaimed Tootles, springing out.

He turned with an air of grave solicitude.

“Sassafras, I do believe I forgot to pay the chauffeur. Small change, you know, is such a nuisance. I’m going to let you be my banker for a couple of days. Give him a liberal tip. And I say, when the florist comes in the morning with my boutonnière, attend to that, too, will you? Oh, yes, if Mrs. Van Astorbilt calls again this evening, tell her I have gone to the country—but discreetly, Sassafras, discreetly, in your best manner. Remember—she is a woman, like your mother.”

The sparkling elevator sagged out of sight, burying in the cavernous shaft the body-shaking peals of laughter, leaving O’Leary and Tootles moving down the spacious, murky corridor of the sixth floor back. There was a moment of silence, each rather watching the other out of the corner of his eye, and then Tootles heaved a prodigious sigh.

“Say, this is a hell of a place on Christmas eve, isn’t it?”

“Why, boy, I didn’t know it hit you that way,” said King O’Leary, surprised.

“It sure does. ‘Christmas comes but once a year, when it comes it brings good cheer!’ Yes, it does! Wish I could sleep it over. Ugh! Well, anyhow!”

He stopped at the door which bore the inscription:

No Models Wanted.

King O’Leary reluctantly continued farther up the bare hallway to his room.

“I say, over there!”

O’Leary turned, looking back at Tootles, who stood dimly revealed in the light of the half-open door, his head on one side, scratching his ear, as though, by some instinct, he had divined the shadow over the other man’s heart.

“Well, son, what is it?”

“Merry Christmas, and all that sort of thing, you know!”

“Oh, sure—back to you. Merry Christmas?” said the other, as though trying it on his ear, and a loud guffaw followed. “Yes, it’ll be a merry Christmas—I think—NOT!”

King O’Leary turned the lock and flung open the door on the dim solitude of his room. Then he threw on the electric light, and each bare detail came suddenly out—a cot with the cover still turned down, a wash-stand, and an upright piano with an armchair before it, turned sideways, so that he could avail himself of the height of the arm when he played. In one corner was a low hair trunk, reenforced with leather of the make sailors were wont to use.

He closed the door, whistling gloomily, went over to the piano and struck a few aimless chords.

“Anywhere else in civilization, Vladivostok, Valparaiso, or Honolulu, a white man could speak to another on such a night as this; but in this God-forsaken wilderness, I suppose they’d think I was after their watch.”

He turned again to the keyboard, and, playing by ear, with a truly sensitive touch, ran into the Feuer Motif of “Die Walküre.”

“God, that’s great—that is great!” he said solemnly. “That is it—earth, fire, and water!”

He tried another start—shut the piano viciously and rose.

“Damn New York!” he said, with his nose to the curtainless window, peering out at the opposite side of the court, with its chilly, bare outline. “Damn New York for an unfriendly stuck-up port, anyhow! Dozens of poor devils sitting around nursing their misery and afraid to say hello to another human being. Danged if I don’t try it!” he said, all at once, and, slapping on his hat, he went out of his room and up to the corner studio, near which a dozen boxes were piled.

“I’ll try each in turn,” he said grimly, and knocked.

But a moment’s pounding convinced him that the studio was unoccupied, and he turned to the opposite room, which lay next to his, and rapped on it as though to summon forth a spirit.

The door was presently opened, and the figure of a young woman appeared.

“My name’s King O’Leary,” he said desperately, taking off his hat. “I’m looking for some mortal being, man, woman or child, who’s as plumb lonely as I am, to go out and help me through this night. I’m not a thug or a pickpocket, and I’m not fresh. Anywhere else on this blessed globe except here, people would understand me. Well, how about it? I suppose you think I’m crazy?”

She stood a little defensively, her hands behind her back in an attitude which seemed to bar the way into the studio, which lay behind, warm and inviting with the charm her feminine touch had laid over its crude outlines, as the spreading ivy softens the ugliness of a ruin. Her hat and coat were on a near-by chair, as though she were preparing to go out. Though she stood against the light, he was struck with the oddity of her appearance—a certain defiant, youthful erectness in her body, the depth of darkness that lay over her, in the black of her hair, which was braided and coiled about her forehead, and the brown oval of the face—brown as an Indian’s. He could not see the eyes for the moment.