The next day Vera grew worse, as Luba in the market place kept insisting that the Captain killed her Little Master of the Birds; until a committee of three working-men took it upon themselves to investigate. They started for the hill, but stopped off in order to induce the schoolmaster to join them. The schoolmaster, however, did not allow himself to be disturbed. He was playing chess with a friend, and kept tapping the dull-sounding table with his fingers, and repeating in a monotone: "If he disturbs that pawn, he may lose his queen." As the committee went on to the hill, they were overtaken by the doctor in his carriage. At last they arrived at the stone house and found the doctor walking briskly up and down the drawing room smoking a cigarette--he had not yet told the Captain. Upstairs they could hear the Captain in Vera's darkened room, kneel down beside the bed. "Do you know, my darling," he spoke. "I have never kept anything from you--but the other day when I told you about the beggar, I should have told you that he was--Are you listening, my dear? I should have told you that he was the same boy--the poor boy that lived with the pigeons. "See; we have already been--are you listening, my dear? God has already punished us--now you can get better and we will go away from here. We will go to some quiet place.--Are you listening, my dear? We will go to some--do you hear me, Vera? My darling girl, don't sleep now. Tell me, what did the doctor say? Wake up Vera."--But the hand of death had already passed over Vera. The Little Master of the Sky didn't need a grave and didn't want one. But they dug one for him just the same, at the end of the town. While his pigeons encircled the sky and swished the air, the villagers straightened his twisted, little body and slipped it into a narrow box, and lowered him down. The poor folk gave him a little grave, but he doesn't need it for he never uses it. THE MAN WITH THE GOOD FACE[16] By FRANK LUTHER MOTT (From _The Midland_) A subway express train roared into the Fourteenth Street Station and came to a full stop, and the doors slid open. It was just at the lull of traffic before the rush of the late afternoon, and the cars were only comfortably filled. As the train stopped, a small, unobtrusive man, sitting near one end of the third car, quickly rose from his seat on the side of the car facing the station platform, and peered through the opposite windows. All the way up from Wall Street this little man had sat quietly observing through his deep-set grey eyes every man or woman who had entered or left the car. His figure was slight, and the office pallor that overspread his serious face seemed to give to his eyes a singular intensity of gaze. Now he peered intently out at the people on the Fourteenth Street platform.