The juggler grew restive lest Euphemia should enter while he was a bone of contention between the two, for Mrs. Sims was still disposed to call on all who might behold to note the beauty of the fit of his shirt, and Tubal Cain Sims as resolutely refused to admire. Royce was ready to laugh at himself that he should thus desire to shirk these personalities in Euphemia’s presence, and that he should assume for her a delicacy in the discussion which he was very sure Mrs. Sims would not appreciate. Yet he was not so coxcombical as to preëmpt for her Mrs. Sims’s standpoint; he realized that she might be as stolidly unadmiring as Tubal Cain himself. He finished his breakfast with a hasty swallow or two, and was about to take himself off with his fishing-rod down to the river, hearing Mrs. Sims remarking after him, “Ye oughter thank the Lord on your bended knees, young man, fur the fit o’ them clothes,” and Tubal Cain Sims’s growl of objurgation that “folks oughter have better manners an’ sense ’n ter be thankin’ the Lord for the set o’ thar clothes on the blessed Sabbath day.” “Is this Sunday?” asked the juggler, and stood stock-still. “It air the blessed Sabbath,” said Tubal Cain, his eyes still full of the misfit rancor and his mouth full of corn dodger. Ah, how Lucien Royce heard across the silent Cove the bells ringing from the church towers of St. Louis, hundreds of miles away! He distinguished even the melody that the chimes were rippling out,--he would have sworn to it amongst a thousand,--and the booming of heavier metal sounding from neighboring steeples. He knew just how a certain dissonance impinged upon the melodious tumult,--the bell of an old church below Seventeenth Street that had a crack in it and rang false. The raucous voices of newsboys were calling the Sunday papers, much further up town than on week-days. The clanging of the cable cars sounded here, there, everywhere; the sunlit streets were full of people. And then, as his heart was throbbing near to breaking for this his world, his home, of which he was bereft, he realized how his imagination had cheated him. Across the Cove the slanting sun-rays had not yet reached the levels of the basin; the red hue of the dawning still tinged them. The mists of the night clung yet in purple shadowy ravines. The dew was in the air. Away--away--the far city of the mirage lay sluggard and asleep. No bell rang there save the Angelus. Now and again a figure slipped along to early mass. The rumbling wheels of a baker’s wagon or the tinkle of a milkman’s bell might sound,--a phase of the town, an hour of the day he did not know and for which he did not care. And so he was admonished to beware of fancies. This--_this_ was his home, and here he was to spend his life.