LD MR. submitted ill-humoredly to being prepared for his daily walk. Ruth, his granddaughter, got down on her knees to clasp the red-lined arctics, while her mother fastened a wadded muffler around the old man's neck. When he was all ready—the ear-muffs of his seal-skin cap had been pulled over his ears, and the last button of his overcoat fastened—he picked up his cane with a long sigh of resignation.
“I don't know what's got into you, Barbara,” he said querulously, as a breath of frosty air from the opened door struck him. “I'll cough my head off to-night, after five minutes in that wind.”
Barbara held the door resolutely open, but she looked distressed.
“The doctor said 'every day,'” she protested. “He said if you didn't want to go, to coax you to. It would be better than medicine.”
Mr. MacDougall coughed. The first cough being shamelessly forced, and giving every evidence of it, he tried again, with more success.
“Of course,” Barbara said anxiously, “if you think it will make you ill—” She shivered in the draught, in her thin white waist. “Perhaps you'd better not go after all, father. I'm sure I don't want you to be sick.”
The old man looked out across the street. A fine snow was falling—a hard-frozen snow that pelted the pedestrians like needles, and blew knee-high along the car-tracks with stinging velocity. Then he took a firmer grip on his cane and went out into the vestibule.
“I'm going,” he said testily. “I don't intend to be fussed over and swathed and swaddled like a mummy for nothing.”
He coughed again, very successfully, and Ruth, who had been consulting the thermometer beside the door, turned to her mother.
“It's only twenty above zero, mother,” she said doubtfully.
But the old gentleman had descended the steps now and stood with his feet well apart, bracing himself against the wind by holding to the area-railing. The sight of another elderly gentleman, similarly clad, and seeking the support of the area-railing next door, decided him. He threw out his chest and squared his shoulders aggressively.
“Go in and shut the door,” he called. “You've started me on this thing and I'm going to see it through. But you might telephone to that nincompoop of a doctor, to stop in to-night.”
He coughed again, and then buried his chin in his muffler and started slowly down the street.
“Barbara,” he called, turning, “if that Thompson jack-a-dandy comes to see Ruth, now that you've got me out of the house, remember what I told you—and go in and shut the door. The furnace heat the universe.”
Ruth's face was crimson as the door closed obediently, and she faced her mother in the hall.
“I'll not stand it,” she said. “Old people ought to forget their malice and hatefulness, and think of—eternity and—”
“Hush,” Barbara said quickly. “I'm sure Wallace Thompson understands. And as for old Mr. Thompson, he and your grandfather are just two children who are 'mad,' that's all. They were two little boys playing marbles, and Mr. Thompson got the most marbles.”
Ruth smiled suddenly. The hall was very dark, even for a city one, and at the bend of the stairs a feeble imitation of sunlight revealed the famous MacDougall stained-glass window—famous once, but now obscured by the twelve-inch proximity of a spite-wall. For between the two houses, reaching to the topmost floor, and extending the length of the properties, was a brick wall as relentless, as impermeable to sunshine, and as hard as the heart of an outraged elderly gentleman can ever be. Whereupon, brick walls being among the particular things that telephones were made to circumvent, and being better than locksmiths in the service of love, Ruth called up the house next door, and thus kept within the letter of the law.
“In an hour,” she said. “By the lake, Wallace. Why no, it's not cold here. Your wall keeps the wind away like a blanket.”
She smiled as she cut off his vehement “Oh, I say, Ruth.”
Meanwhile, a dozen feet from the door, Mr. MacDougall had felt a hand timidly touch his arm, and had stopped—not at once, but slowing down gradually, as the icy pavement required.
“Well?” he demanded fiercely.
The wind struck him in the face and a glance back at the house showed that Ruth and her mother had disappeared. Beside him stood, shivering, an elderly man in a derby-hat and a short black overcoat. The coat, lacking buttons, was fastened together with heavy brown twine, making an eccentric but efficacious closure. One ungloved hand was thrust into a pocket, while in the other, dirty, blue with cold, and rough with long exposure, he held out a bundle of lead-pencils.
“Buy a pencil, sir?” he whined.