With peculiar irony, the passing of that pallid, vague, and ineffectual character, Mrs. Thursby, proved the signal for the dissolution of the family which, denying her both respect and affection during her life, had none the less lost, in losing her, its sole motive or excuse for unity.

The return from the cemetery was accomplished toward noon of a July day whose heavily overcast sky seemed only to act as a blanket over the city, compressing its heated and humid atmosphere until the least exertion was to be indulged in only at the cost of saturated clothing.

The four were crowded in common misery within a shabby, stuffy, undertaker\'s growler.

Thursby occupied the back seat with his eldest daughter, notwithstanding the fact that, since apprising her of her mother\'s death, the morning of her return, he had addressed no word to her directly. He sat now with fat and mottled hands resting on his knees, his waistcoat unbuttoned, exposing soiled linen, his dull and heavy gaze steadfastly directed through the window.

Opposite him, on the forward seat, Edna wept silently and incessantly into a black-bordered handkerchief.

Butch, beside her, looked serious and depressed in a suit of black clothing borrowed for the occasion.

Nobody spoke from the time they re-entered the carriage, after the burial, until they left it. Joan huddled herself into her corner, putting all possible space between herself and her father. A sense of lassitude was heavy upon her. She meditated vaguely on the strangeness of life, its inscrutable riddle, the enigma of its brief and feverish transit from black oblivion through light to black oblivion. But the problem only wearied her. She dropped it from time to time and tried to think of other things; as a rule this resulted in her speculations centering about Butch.

The boy mystified her, awed her a little with a suggestion of spirit and strength, character and intelligence, conveyed by a forceful yet unassuming manner. It was a new manner, strangely developed in the year that spaced her knowledge of him, only to be explained by his sudden determination to go seriously to work and make something of himself; and the motive for that remained inexplicable, and would ever as far as concerned Joan. For the personal reticence that had always sealed his cynical mouth was more than ever characteristic of the boy today; and the sympathy which once had existed between himself and Joan was become a thing of yesterday and as if it had never been. His attitude toward her was touched with just a colour of contempt, almost too faint to be resented; she shrank from it, feeling that he saw through her shallowness, that he knew her, not as Marbridge knew her, perhaps, or as Billy Salute, but thoroughly and intimately, and far better than she would ever know herself.

She knew now—through Edna—that within the last twelve-month Butch had learned his trade of chauffeur and pursued it with such diligence that, aside from being the main support of the family which she had deserted, he was half-owner of his taxicab and in a way to acquire an interest in a small garage....

When the carriage stopped, the father was the first to alight. With no word or look for either of his daughters, and only a semi-articulate growl for Butch, to the effect that they\'d see one another again at dinner, he pulled his rusty derby well forward over his haggard, haunted eyes, thrust his hands deep into trouser-pockets, and slouched ponderously away in the direction of his news-stand. Before he turned the avenue corner, Joan, looking after him while she waited for Butch to settle with the driver, saw Thursby produce his packet of dope and, moistening a thumb, begin to con it as he plodded on.

So, pursuing his passion to the end, he passed forever from her life, yet never altogether from her memory; in which, as time matured the girl, his inscrutable personality assumed the character of a symbol of aborted destiny. What he had been, whence he had sprung, what he might have become, she never learned....

Then, preceded by Edna, followed by Butch, she climbed for the last time those weary stairs.

Arrived in the flat, Butch shut himself into his room to change to working clothes. He could not afford to waste an afternoon, he said. Joan and Edna sat down in the dar............