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“Some salesman!” My hard-faced companion regarded the lank figure overhanging the fence with new respect. “Looks to me like the original Gloom,” he observed. “What’s his grouch?”

“Conscience.”

“He must have a bum one!”

“He has a busy one. He expends a great amount of time and sorrow repenting of our sins.”

“Whose sins?” asked the other, opening wider his dull and weary eyes.

“Ours. His neighbors. Everybody in Our Square.”

My interlocutor promptly and fitly put into words the feeling which had long lurked within my consciousness, ashamed to express itself against a monument of dismal pity such as Bartholomew Storrs. “He’s got a nerve!” he asserted.

Warming to him for his pithy analysis of character, I enlarged upon my theme. “He rebukes MacLachan for past drunkenness. He mourns for Schepstein, who occasionally helps out a friend at ten per cent, as a usurer. He once accused old Madame Tallafferr of pride, but he’ll never do that again. He calls the Little Red Doctor, our local physician, to account for profanity, and gets a fresh sample every time. Even against the Bonnie Lassie, whose sculptures you can just see in that little house near the corner”–I waved an illustrative hand–“he can quote Scripture, as to graven images. We all revere and respect and hate him. He’s coming this way now.”

“Good day, Dominie,” said Bartholomew Storrs, as he passed, in such a tone as a very superior angel might employ toward a particularly damned soul.

“That frown,” I explained to my companion, after returning the salutation, “means that I failed to attend church yesterday.”

But the hard, pink man had lost interest in Bartholomew. “Called you ‘Dominie,’ didn’t he?” he remarked. “I thought I had you right. Heard of you from a little red-headed ginger-box named Smith.”

“You know the Little Red Doctor?”

“I met him,” he replied evasively. “He told me to look you up. ‘You talk to the Dominie,’ he says.”

“About what?”

“I’m coming to that.” He leaned forward to place a muscular and confidential hand on my knee. “First, I’d like to do you a little favor,” he continued in his husky and intimate voice. “If you’re looking for some quick and easy money, I got a little tip that I’d like to pass on to you.”

“Evidently the Little Red Doctor told you that my mind was a tottering ruin, which may be quite true; but if it’s a matter of investing in the Peruvian Gold, Rubber Tree, and Perpetual Motion Concession, I’m reluctantly compelled–“

“Forget it!” adjured the hard, pink man in a tone which secured my silence and almost my confidence. “This is a hoss. Seven to one, and a sure cop. I know hosses. I’ve owned ’em.”

“Thank you, but I can’t afford such luxuries as betting.”

“You can’t afford not to have something down on this if it’s only a shoestring. No? Oh–well!”

Again drawing the art-square from his pocket he lifted his pearl-gray derby and dabbed despairingly at his brow. Catching the scent hot and fresh, Susan Gluck’s Orphan came dashing up-wind giving tongue, or rather, nose, voluptuously.

“Mm-m-m! Snmmff!” inhaled the Orphan, wrinkling ecstatic nostrils. “Mister, lemme smell it some more!”

Graciously the dispenser of fragrance waved his balm-laden handkerchief. “Like it, kiddie?” he said.

“Oh, it’s grand!” She stretched out her little grimy paws. “Please, Mister,” she entreated, “would you flop it over ’em, just once?”

The pink man tossed it to her. “Take it along and, when you get it all snuffed up, give it back to the Dominie here for me.”

“Oh, gracious!” said the Orphan, incredulous at this bounty. “Can I have it till to-morrah?“

“Sure! What’s the big idea for to-morrow?”

“I’m goin’ to a funeral. I want it to cry in,” said the Orphan importantly.

“A funeral?” I asked. “In Our Square? Whose?”

“My cousin Minnie. She’s goin’ to be buried in God’s Acre, an’ I’m invited ’cause I’m a r’lation. She married a sporting gentleman named Hines an’ she died yesterday,” said the precocious Orphan.

So Minnie Munn, pretty, blithe, life-loving Minnie, whose going had hurt us so, had come back to Our Square, with all her love of life quenched. She had promised that she would come back, in the little, hysterical, defiant note she left under the door. Her father and mother must wait and not worry. There are thousands of homes, I suppose, in which are buried just such letters as Minnie’s farewell to her parents; rebellious, passionate, yearning, pitiful. Ah, well! The moth must break its chrysalis. The flower must rend its bonds toward the light. Little Minnie was “going on the stage.” A garish and perilous stage it was, whereon Innocence plays a part as sorry as it is brief. And now she was making her exit, without applause. Memory brought back a picture of Minnie as I had first seen her, a wee thing, blinking and smiling in the arms of her Madonna-faced mother, on a bench in Our Square, and the mother (who could not wait for the promised return–she has lain in God’s Acre these three years) crooning to her an unforgettable song, mournfully prophetic: