The Wolfs Long Howl | Page 9

was renewed by the purpose in life which he had allowed to lapse in his desperate days of defeat. He would find Sylvia. She might be in sorrow, in trouble; he could not wait, but leaped out of his office and ran down the long stairways, too hurried and restless to wait for the lagging elevator of the great building where he had suffered so much. The search was longer and more difficult than the seeker had anticipated. It required but little effort to learn that Dr. Hartley had been dead for months, and that his family had gone away from the roomy house where their home had been for many years. To learn more was for a time impossible. He had known little of the family kinship and connections, and it seemed as if an adverse fate pursued his attempts to find the hidden links which bind together the people of a great city. But George Henry persisted, and his heart grew warm within him. He hummed an old tune as he walked quickly along the crowded streets, smiling to himself when he found himself singing under his breath the old, old song:
Who is Silvia? What is she That all swains commend her?
In another quarter of the city, far removed from her former home and neighbors, George Henry at last found Sylvia, her mother and a younger brother, living quietly with the mother's widowed sister. During his search for her the image of the woman he had once hoped might be his wife had grown larger and dearer in his mind and heart. He wondered how he had ever given her up, and how he had lived through so much suffering, and then through relief from suffering, without the past and present joy of his life. He wondered if he should find her changed. He need have had no fears. He found, when at last he met her, that she had not changed, unless, it may be, to have become even more lovable in his eyes. In the moment when he first saw her now he knew he had found the world again, that he was no longer a stranger in it, that he was living in it and a part of it. A sweetheart has been a tonic since long before knights wore the gloves of ladies on their crests. Within a week, through Sylvia, he had almost forgotten that one can get lost, even as a lost child, in this great, grinding world of ours, and within a year he and Mrs. George Henry Harrison were "at home" to their friends.
After a time, when George Henry Harrison had settled down into steady and appreciative happiness, and had begun to indulge his fancies in matters apart from the honeymoon, there appeared upon the wall over the fireplace in his library a picture which unfailingly attracted the attention and curiosity of visitors to that hospitable hearth. The scene represented was but that upon an island in the Bering Sea, and there was in the aspect of it something more than the traditional abomination of desolation, for there was a touch of bloodthirsty and hungry life. Up away from the sea arose a stretch of dreary sand, and in the far distance were hills covered with snow and dotted with stunted pine, and bleak and forbidding, though not tenantless. In the foreground, close to the turbid waters which washed this frozen almost solitude, a great, gaunt wolf sat with his head uplifted to the lowering skies, and so well had the artist caught the creature's attitude, that looking upon it one could almost seem to hear the mournful but murderous howl and gathering cry.
This was only a fancy which George Henry had--that the wolf should hang above the fireplace--and perhaps it needed no such reminder to make of him the man he proved in helping those whom he knew the wolf was hunting. His eye was kindly keen upon his friends, and he was quick to perceive when one among them had begun to hear the howlings which had once tormented him so sorely; he fancied that there was upon the faces of those who listened often to that mournful music an expression peculiar to such suffering. And he found such ways as he could to cheer and comfort those unfortunate during their days of trial. He was a helpful man. It is good for a man to have had bad times.

AN ULM
"It is as you say; he is not handsome, certainly not beautiful as flowers and the stars and women are, but he has another sort of beauty, I think, such a beauty as made Victor Hugo's monster, Gwynplaine, fascinating, or gives a certain sort of charm to a banded rattlesnake. He is not much like the dove-eyed setter