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Wars and exiles alike come to an end in time. And in time our two wanderers returned, but Mary first, David having been sent into Germany with the Army of Occupation. Modest announcements in the theatrical columns informed an indifferent theater-going world that Miss Marie Courtenay, an actress new to Broadway, was to play the ingenue part in the latest comedy by a highly popular dramatist. Immediately upon the production, the theater-going world ceased to be indifferent to the new actress; in fact, it went into one of its occasional furores about her. Not that she was in any way a great genius, but she had a certain indefinable and winningly individual quality. The critics discussed it gravely and at length, differing argumentatively as to its nature and constitution. I could have given them a hint. My predictions regarding the ancestral potencies of the monkey-face were being abundantly justified.

No announcements, even of the most modest description, heralded the arrival of Sergeant Major (if you please!) David Berthelin upon his native shores. He came at once to Our Square and tackled the Little Red Doctor.

“Where is she?” he asked.

The Little Red Doctor assumed an air of incredulous surprise. “Have you still got that bee in your bonnet?” said he.

“Where is she?” repeated the Weeping Scion.

Maneuvering for time and counsel, the Little Red Doctor took him to see the Bonnie Lassie and they sent for me. We beheld a new and reconstituted David. He was no longer pretty. The soft brown eyes were less soft and more alert, and there were little wrinkles at their corners. He had broadened a foot or so. That pinky-delicate complexion by which he had, in earlier and easier days, set obvious store, was brownish and looked hardened. The Cupid’s-bow of his mouth had straightened out. High on one cheekbone was a not unsightly scar. His manner was unassertive, but eminently self-respecting, and me, whom aforetime he had stigmatized as a “white-whiskered old goat,” he now addressed as “Sir.”

“Perhaps you’ll tell me where she is, sir,” said he patiently.

“Leave it to me,” said the Bonnie Lassie, who has an unquenchable thirst for the dramatic in real life. “And keep next Sunday night open.”

She arranged with Mary McCartney to give a reading on that evening, at her studio, of David’s “Doggy” from the “Grass and Asphalt” sketches which he had written in hospital. It was a quaint, pathetic little conceit, the bewildered philosophy of a waif of the streets, as expressed to his waif of a dog. For the supporting part we borrowed Willy Woolly from the House of Silvery Voices, and admirably he played it, barking accurately and with true histrionic fervor in the right places (besides promptly falling in love with the star at the first and only rehearsal). After the try-out, Mary came over to my bench with a check for a rather dazzling sum in her hand, and said that now was the time to settle accounts, but she never could repay–and so forth and so on; all put so sweetly and genuinely that I heartily wished I might accept the thanks if not the check. Instead of which I blurted out the truth.

“Oh, Dominie!” said the girl, with such reproach that my heart sank within me. “Do you think that was fair? Don’t you know that I never could have taken the money?”

“Precisely. And we had to find a way to make you take it. We couldn’t have you dying on the premises,” I argued with a feeble attempt at jocularity.

“But from him!” she said. “After what had happened–And his mother. How could you let me do it!”

“I thought you would have gotten over that feeling by this time,” I ventured.

“Oh, there’s none of the old feeling left,” she answered, so simply that I knew she believed her own statement. “But to have lived on his money–Where is he?” she asked abruptly.

I told her that also and about Sunday night; the whole thing. The Bonnie Lassie would have slain me. But I couldn’t help it. I was feeling rather abject.