From the Housetops | Page 6

in the afternoon that he would know more about women than he'd ever
known before by the time his interview was over, and had drily added
that the world was full to overflowing of good women who had not
married the men they loved,--principally, he was just enough to explain,
because the men they loved preferred to marry other women.
Braden had left him seated in the library after a stormy half-hour; and
as he rushed from the room, he found Mr. Thorpe's man standing in the
hall outside the door, just as he always stood, waiting for orders with
the sly, patient smile on his lips.
For sixty years Templeton Thorpe had lived in the house near
Washington Square, and for thirty-two of them Wade had been within
sound of his voice, no matter how softly he called. The master never
rang a bell, night or day. He did not employ Wade to answer bells. The
butler could do that, or the parlour-maid, if the former happened to be
tipsier than usual. Wade always kept his head cocked a little to one side,
in the attitude of one listening, and so long had he been at it that it is
doubtful if he could have cocked it the other way without snapping
something in his neck. That right ear of his was open for business
twenty-four hours out of the day. The rest of his body may have slept

as soundly as any man's, but his ear was always awake, on land or sea.
It was his boast that he had never had a vacation.
Braden, after his long ride down Fifth Avenue on the stage, found
Wade in the hall.
"Is my grandfather in the library, Wade?" he asked, surprised to find
the man at the foot of the stairs, quite a distance from his accustomed
post.
"He is, sir," said Wade. "He asked me to wait here until you arrived and
then to go upstairs for a little while, sir. I fancy he has something to say
to you in private." Which was a naïve way of explaining that Mr.
Thorpe did not want him to have his ear cocked in the hall during the
conversation that was to be resumed after an advisable interval.
Observing the strange pallor in the young man's usually ruddy face, he
solicitously added: "Shall I get you a glass of--ahem!--spirits, sir? A
snack of brandy is a handy thing to--"
"No, thank you, Wade. You forget that I am a doctor. I never take
medicine," said Braden, forcing a smile.
"A very good idea, sir," said Wade.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Tresslyn had reported to Anne, in the cosy little
boudoir at the top of the house in the Seventies.
"It is just as well that you insisted on me seeing him, dear," she said on
entering the room. "He would have said things to you that you could
not have forgiven. As it is, you have nothing to forgive, and you have
saved yourself a good many tears. He--but, my dear, what's this? Have
you been crying?"
Anne, tall and slender, stood with her back to the window, her exquisite
face in the shadows. Even in the dim, colourless light of the waning
day, she was lovely--lovely even with the wet cheeks and the drooped,
whimpering lips.

"What did he say, mother?" she asked, her voice hushed and broken.
"How did he look?" Her head was bent and she looked at her mother
from beneath pain-contracted brows. "Was he angry? Was he desperate?
Did--did he say that he--that he loved me?"
"He looked very well, he was angry, he was desperate and he said that
he loved you," replied Mrs. Tresslyn, with the utmost composure. "So
dry your eyes. He did just what was to have been expected of him, and
just what you counted upon. He--"
"He honestly, truly said that he loved me?" cried the girl, lifting her
head and drawing a deep breath.
"Yes,--truly."
Anne dried her eyes with a fresh bit of lace.
"Sit down, mother, and tell me all about it," she said, jerking a small
chair around so that it faced the couch. Then she threw herself upon the
latter and, reaching out with a slender foot, drew the chair closer. "Sit
up close, and let's hear what my future grandson had to say."
CHAPTER III
Braden Thorpe had spent two years in the New York hospitals, after
graduation from Johns Hopkins, and had been sent to Germany and
Austria by his grandfather when he was twenty-seven, to work under
the advanced scientists of Vienna and Berlin. At twenty-nine he came
back to New York, a serious-minded, purposeful man, wrapped up in
his profession and heterodoxically humane, to use the words of his
grandfather. The first day after