Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy | Page 8

to Liverpool, to the end of the earth."
She paused in thought a moment and then added.
"Come to the house just before midnight. William, the second chauffeur (he is devoted to me), shall be at the door with the third car. The fourth footman will bring my things--I can rely on him; the fifth housemaid can have them all ready--she would never betray me. I will have the undergardener--the sixth--waiting at the iron gate to let you in; he would die rather than fail me."
She paused again--then she went on.
"There is only one thing, dearest, that I want to ask. It is not much. I hardly think you would refuse it at such an hour. May I bring my husband with me?"
De Vere's face blanched.
"Must you?" he said.
"I think I must," said Dorothea. "You don't know how I've grown to value, to lean upon, him. At times I have felt as if I always wanted him to be near me; I like to feel wherever I am--at the play, at a restaurant, anywhere --that I can reach out and touch him. I know," she continued, "that it's only a wild fancy and that others would laugh at it, but you can understand, can you not--carino caruso mio? And think, darling, in our new life, how busy he, too, will be--making money for all of us--in a new money market. It's just wonderful how he does it."
A great light of renunciation lit up de Vere's face.
"Bring him," he said.
"I knew that you would say that," she murmured, "and listen, pochito pocket-edition, may I ask one thing more, one weeny thing? William, the second chauffeur--I think he would fade away if I were gone--may I bring him, too? Yes! O my darling, how can I repay you? And the second footman, and the third housemaid--if I were gone I fear that none of--"
"Bring them all," said de Vere half bitterly; "we will all elope together."
And as he spoke Mr. Overgold sauntered over from the cashier's desk, his open purse still in his hand, and joined them. There was a dreamy look upon his face.
"I wonder," he murmured, "whether personality survives or whether it, too, when up against the irresistible, dissolves and resolves itself into a series of negative reactions?"
De Vere's empty heart echoed the words.
Then they passed out and the night swallowed them up.

CHAPTER IV
At a little before midnight on the next night, two motors filled with muffled human beings might have been perceived, or seen, moving noiselessly from Riverside Drive to the steamer wharf where lay the Gloritania.
A night of intense darkness enveloped the Hudson. Outside the inside of the dockside a dense fog wrapped the Statue of Liberty. Beside the steamer customs officers and deportation officials moved silently to and fro in long black cloaks, carrying little deportation lanterns in their hands.
To these Mr. Overgold presented in silence his deportation certificates, granting his party permission to leave the United States under the imbecility clause of the Interstate Commerce Act.
No objection was raised.
A few moments later the huge steamer was slipping away in the darkness.
On its deck a little group of people, standing beside a pile of first-class cabin luggage, directed a last sad look through their heavy black disguise at the rapidly vanishing shore which they could not see.
De Vere, who stood in the midst of them, clasping their hands, thus stood and gazed his last at America.
"Spoof!" he said.
(We admit that this final panorama, weird in its midnight mystery, and filling the mind of the reader with a sense of something like awe, is only appended to Spoof in order to coax him to read our forthcoming sequel, Spiff!)

II.--The Reading Public. A Book Store Study
"Wish to look about the store? Oh, oh, by all means, sir," he said. Then as he rubbed his hands together in an urbane fashion he directed a piercing glance at me through his spectacles.
"You'll find some things that might interest you," he said, "in the back of the store on the left. We have there a series of reprints--Universal Knowledge from Aristotle to Arthur Balfour--at seventeen cents. Or perhaps you might like to look over the Pantheon of Dead Authors at ten cents. Mr. Sparrow," he called, "just show this gentleman our classical reprints--the ten-cent series."
With that he waved his hand to an assistant and dismissed me from his thought.
In other words, he had divined me in a moment. There was no use in my having bought a sage-green fedora in Broadway, and a sporting tie done up crosswise with spots as big as nickels. These little adornments can never hide the soul within. I was a professor, and he knew it, or at least, as part of his business, he could divine it on the instant.
The sales manager of the biggest book store for