n't
sleep a wink last night. Honest, not a wink! A man's got to have _some_
sympathy in his life. Damn it, in a crisis like this--”

“Perhaps you can tell me with even greater lucidity when you are coming
back,” said the Worm dryly.

Hy gulped, stared blankly at his friend, uttered explosively the one
word, “Monday!” Then he glanced at his watch and hurried out of the
building.

The Worm slowly shook his head and took the elevator.

The long dim studio was quite as usual, with its soft-toned walls,
dilapidated but comfortable furniture, Hy's piano, the decrepit flat-top
desk, the two front windows from which you could see all of the Square
and the mile of roofs beyond it, and still beyond, the heights of
New Jersey. The coffee percolator stood on the bookcase--on the empty
bookcase where once had been the Worm's library. In this room he had
studied and written the hundreds of futile book reviews that nobody ever
heard of, that had got him precisely nowhere. In this room he had lived
in a state of soul near serenity until he met Sue Wilde. Now it brought
heartache. Merely to push open the door and step within was to stir
poignantly haunting memories of a day that was sharply gone. It was like
opening old letters. The scent of a thoughtlessly happy past was faintly
there.

Something else was there--a human object, sprawled abjectly in the
Morris chair, garbed in slippers and bathrobe, hair disheveled, but
black-rimmed eye-glasses still on his nose, the conspicuous black
ribbon still hanging from them down the long face. It was that
well-known playwright, Peter Ericson Mann, author of _The Buzzard, Odd
Change and Anchored_; and, more recently, of the scenario for Jacob
Zanin's Nature him. Author, too, of the new satirical comedy. _The
Triffler_, written at Sue Wilde and booked for production in September
at the Astoria Theater.

The Worm had not told Hy that he had just seen Sue. Now, standing
motionless, the thousand memory-threads that bound the old rooms to
his heart clinging there like leafless ivy, he