“He used to do a clog dance with it and have that laugh of his thrown in for good value. Well, the people forgot his Shakespearean triumphs and his drama work; they just sang the old song between their laughing and crying. Then two men helped Sam to half stand, a terrible effort for the dear old chap, but the house rewarded him,—they sobbed louder than ever. All Sam said was, with an echo of the old street gamin laugh, ‘Thank ’ee, sirs’—and then he fell back—dead! The excitement was too much ... and the money will go to the soldiers.” “But that,” said Bliss, after Thurley managed to stop sobbing, “isn’t the thing that hurts the worst. That was a superb ending—just as Sam himself would have staged it. But the very next day, the leading daily announced they would run a series entitled ‘Sam Sparling’s Breach of Promise Suits’ as told by an ‘old beau’—and there you have what I’ve said in a nutshell—the wrong the man Sparling did to his better self living after him, the good forgotten, undervalued. All due to the present day system of advertising and standards for artists’ personalities.” “What will it be after the war?” Thurley added. “It will be the duty of every person to discriminate between the army, whether military, spiritual or mental, which has won the cause and what I name the jumblers-in, emotional hoboes who have profiteered or indulged in mental orgies or distorted patriotism in order to market inferior wares—” He was about to say more when Miss Clergy came in, her sharp eyes looking at Thurley’s tear-stained cheeks. Being a mere man, Hobart fled! CHAPTER XXXIV In September Thurley did go back to the Corners, Miss Clergy with her, but she did not take the maid, the accompanist, the extra motor car with which to startle the natives. “I keep humming the old tune: ‘Home, boys, home, in the old countree, ’Neath the oak and the ash and the spreading maple-tree,’” she confessed to Bliss the day before she left, “so it’s home I’m going and I’ll probably race back to town and wonder what madness moved me.” Her concert season did not begin until November, for which she was thankful and with Miss Clergy amicably assenting to the return, Thurley sent word to reopen the Fincherie. Inspiring her return was the longing to see Dan and Lorraine and the harmony which their child had brought them. Envious though she was and starved with the longing to have some one of her very own, Thurley had come to judge things with a broader gauge. She wanted the satisfaction of saying to Dan that she was glad for him and she understood. She must tell Lorraine that she was truly friends with “the family!”