Quin | Page 7

artist, Sergeant Graham, must remain aloof from the market-place. Now that I have retired permanently from the stage in order to devote my time exclusively to writing, my only business engagement is a series of lectures at the university, where, as you know, I occupy the chair of Dramatic Literature."
The chair thus euphemistically referred to was scarcely more than a three-legged stool, which he occupied four mornings in the week, the rest of his time being spent at home in the arduous task of writing tragedies in blank verse.
"What I got to think about is a job," said Quin, much more interested in his own affairs than in those of his host.
"Commercial or professional?" inquired Mr. Martel.
"Oh, I can turn my hand to 'most anything," bragged Quin, blowing smoke-rings at the ceiling. "It's experience that counts, and, believe me, I've had a plenty."
"Experience plus education," added Mr. Martel; "we must not underestimate the advantages of education."
"That's where I'm short," admitted Quin. "My folks were all smart enough. Guess if they had lived I'd been put through college and all the rest of it. My grandfather was Dr. Ezra Quinby. Ever hear of him?"
Mr. Martel had to acknowledge that he had not.
"Guess he is better known in China than in America," said Quin. "He died before I was born."
"And you have no people in America?"
"No people anywhere," said Quin cheerfully; "but I got a lot of friends scattered around over the world, and a bull-dog and a couple of cats up at a lumber-camp near Portland."
"Cassius tells me that you are thinking of returning to Maine."
Quin ran his fingers through his hair and laughed. "That was yesterday," he said. "To-day you couldn't get me out of Kentucky with a machine-gun!"
Claude Martel rose and laid an affectionate hand on his shoulder. "Then, my boy, we claim you as our own. Cassius' home is your home, his family your family, his----"
The address of welcome was cut short by Cass's arrival with an armful of wood which he deposited on the hearth, and a moment later the girls, followed by Edwin, came trooping in from the kitchen.
"Let's make a circle round the fire and sing the old year out," suggested Rose gaily. "Myrna, get the banjo and the guitar. Shall I play on the piano, Papa Claude, or will you?"
Mr. Martel, expressing the noble sentiment that age should always be an accompaniment to youth, took his place at the piano and, with a pose worthy of Rubinstein, struck a few preliminary chords, while the group about the fire noisily settled itself for the evening.
"You can put your head against my knees, if you like," Rose said to Quin, who was sprawling on the floor at her feet. "There, is that comfy?"
"I'll say it's all right!" said Quin with heartfelt satisfaction.
There was something free and easy and gipsy-like about the evening, a sort of fireside picnic that brought June dreams in January. As the hours wore on, the singing, which had been noisy and rollicking, gradually mellowed into sentiment, a sentiment that found vent in dreamy eyes and long-drawn-out choruses, with a languorous over-accentuation of the sentimental passages. One by one, the singers fell under the spell of the music and the firelight. Cass and Fan Loomis sat shoulder to shoulder on the broken-springed couch and gazed with blissful oblivion into the red embers on the hearth. Rose, whose voice led all the rest, surreptitiously wiped her eyes when no one was looking; Edwin and Myrna, solemnly plucking their banjo and guitar, were lost in moods of dormant emotion; while Papa Claude at the piano let his dim eyes range the pictured walls, while his memory traveled back through the years on many a secret tryst of its own.
But it was the lank Sergeant with the big feet, and the hair that stood up where it shouldn't, who dared to dream the most preposterous dream of them all. For, as he sang there in the firelight, a little god was busy lighting the tapers in the most sacred shrines of his being, until he felt like a cathedral at high mass with all the chimes going.
"There's a long, long trail a-winding Into the land of my dreams, Where the nightingales are singing And a white moon beams."
How many times he had sung it in France!--jolting along muddy, endless roads, heartsick, homesick.
"There's a long, long night of waiting Until my dreams all come true, Till the day when I'll be going Down that long, long trail with you."
What had "you" meant to him then? A girl--a pretty girl, of course; but any girl. And now?
Ah, now he knew what he had been going toward, not only on those terrible roads in France, but all through the years of his life. An exquisite, imperious little officer's girl