 in that moment was swept
finally within Aunt Matilda's lines. “Oh, no,” she said, speaking with
sudden rapidity, “don't do that. To-morrow will do--just send them.”

Then aware that she was dismissing him indefinitely, her eyes brimming
again (for he had been a good friend), she extended her hand.

The Worm gripped it, bowed to the forbidding figure on the stairs and
left.




CHAPTER XXXI--A PAIR OF RED BOOTS

|THE pleasant days of quiet reading and whimsical reflection were over
for the Worm, poor devil! Life caught him up without warning--that
complex fascinating life of which he had long been a spectator--and
swept him into swift deep currents. He was to be a mere spectator no
longer.

Washington Square glowed with June. The trees had not yet assumed the
faded, dispirited gray-green of midsummer. The bus tops were crowded
with pleasure riders, and a crowd of them pressed about the open-air
terminal station held in check by uniformed guards. On the wide curves
of asphalt hundreds of small Italians danced to the hurdy-gurdy or
played hopscotch or roller-skated. Perambulators lined the shady walks;
nurses, slim and uniformed, fat and unformed, lined the benches.
Students hurried west, south and north (for it was afternoon--Saturday
afternoon, as it happened). Beggars, pedlers, lovers in pairs, unkempt
tenement dwellers, a policeman or two, moved slowly about, but not so
slowly as they would move a few weeks later when the heat of July would
have sapped the vitality of every living thing in town.

But the Worm, standing near the marble arch where Fifth Avenue
splendidly begins, felt not June in his heart. He walked on through the
Square to the old red-brick building where for three years he and Hy Lowe
and Pcter Ericson Mann had dwelt in bachelor comfort. The dingy studio
apartment on the seventh floor had been his home. But it was a haunt of
discord now.

He found the usually effervescent Hy pacing the lower hall like a
leopard in a cage. Hy wore an immaculately pressed suit of creamy gray
flannel, new 