It was her last night in the dormitory room, where she had passed four beautiful years. Her roommate had already departed. Madelaine arose, her calm face suffused with a quiet glory. She turned on the lights. On the dressing table the last of her effects lay for final packing in her bag on the morrow. Among them was a poem framed in a heavy copper border. It had hung above her study table the two years past. She had grown very intimate with that little news-print poem on its deep brown mapping. Though she could repeat it perfectly, she read it again now, line by line and word by word: “Yet some great noon in the sun-glare bright In some vast open space, You’ll stand, flesh-clothed, with your arms outstretched, And triumph on your face.” She sat for a quarter hour with the framed poem in her shapely fingers. Her eyes were looking through a million miles. Nathaniel Forge! Who was he? What had ever caused him to write such a poem? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XIX TACT AND DISCRETION I The box-shop was haunted! Old Jake Richards made the discovery. He based his contention on concrete observation and abstract deduction. Jake was the father of the Richards girl who had remained at work in the Forge factory during the “strike.” He had three boys and four other girls. The Richards family lived on the northern edge of the “flats” at the end of the road on which the box-shop was situated. It was a hollow-eyed gray house with broken steps, set back in a cluttered yard. It had a French roof and its blinds were missing and family bedding was everlastingly hanging from the second-story windows. Jake was Caleb Gridley’s “all-around man” at the tannery, a sort of workman-foreman-superintendent. He had held the position for many years. Socially, from the mere location of his domicile, he did not exist. Then there was the nature of his trade, the skinning of carcasses. Lastly his gross prolificality in the matter of children. Openly he bragged of his wife’s versatility at giving birth to offspring in the morning and “doin’ a good week’s wash” in the afternoon. This may or may not have been true. In so far as fastidious Paris was concerned, however, it established Jake as somewhat beyond the pale. Jake, old Caleb and a gang of steam fitters had worked until three o’clock one Sunday morning installing a new boiler in the tannery. Jake had plodded his weary way homeward just before daylight. Arriving opposite the box-shop office, he raised his eyes to receive the start of his life. There were not many starts in old Jake’s life, by the way. Most of them were stops.