The Wolfs Long Howl | Page 9

well as he
had known his daughter Sylvia, of the dark eyes, but it seemed
impossible that in any state of mind such a thing as Dr. Hartley's
reported death should have made no impression upon him. He was
aroused now, almost for the first time, and was really himself again.
The benumbing influence of his face-to-face fight with poverty and
inactivity disappeared. Sylvia lived again, fresh, vital and strong in her
hold upon him. He 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