Regan's special, ordered out since midnight, stands drumming up the line, and Tim lurking in his corner sees the signal he gives as he crosses the track. The special glides down between them, and once more the vagabond watches through the flying dust clouds the flash of Regan's car, signaling farewell. Now he is free to pick and choose where he will, but Tim Cannon girds his rags with fierce regret; the great things within him cling to this spot; he cannot break away, and he curses in a cold agony of disappointment. "I was too late. Never again will I promise the duty." "You gang boss!" crashes a voice behind him; "breach me the wall at the corner." And the battered man and his crew fly at it with pick and bar. With twisted face and hand clenched on his breast the boy stares at Regan, who has just sent his car home without boarding it at all. "My path lies through this corner; last night you blocked it; to-day I will pass." 'T is a poor sort of triumph over the vagabond, whose body straightens and stiffens proudly. "Which I never could do with you on guard! Come; first through the breach, Timothy! 'T is your right. Now we are through--catch stride here in fortune's highway. You are on duty with Dan Regan!" This queer sentimental thing the man does in honor of his mother's messenger, and never again through all the years is the spell broken which draws the man of pull-down and trample-under away and upward to the things which the pretty colleen of long agone saw beyond the day's work at Turntable. 'T is little we know. MRS. DRAINGER'S VEIL[17] [Note 17: Copyright, 1918, by Smart Set Company, Inc. Copyright, 1920, by Howard Mumford Jones.] BY HOWARD MUMFORD JONES From _The Smart Set_ If the house had been merely shabby I doubt whether I would have been interested. Every residence section has its shabby houses, monuments to departed aspirations, falling into slow decay in the midst of weedy yards, sometimes uninhabited and sometimes sheltering one or two members of the family who apparently have been left, like the ancient furniture, to be forgotten. The paint cracks and peels, the windows fall into impossible angles or are boarded up, the porches sag, the chimneys lose a brick or two and come in time to look like stumps of teeth. By and by the whole structure seems to sink into the grass under the burden of its neglect, and only a faint tenacity, a melancholy inertia keeps it from crumbling altogether. Then suddenly the inhabitants die, the neighbors awake to a sudden sense of change, and that is all.