“All right. Note that, Mr. Bacharach. Sunday morning, December third. I suppose you'd better send your apparatus--easel, and so forth--in advance, hadn't ye?” “Yes; I'll send them to-morrow.” “That settles it. And now, Chris, listen to me. I want to tell you a good joke. Perhaps you didn't notice, but when you were down to the shop this afternoon, Mr. Bacharach here, he came in; and he--” And to the unutterable confusion of Elias, the merciless old man proceeded to tell his daughter the whole story. He wound up thus: “And, actually, Chris, he took you to be an actress. What you scowling at me for? He did, for a fact. He can't deny it. Didn't you, Mr. Bacharach? Didn't you ask me if she wasn't an actress?” Elias appealed to Christine. “Your father is very cruel, isn't he, Miss Redwood?” “He loves to tease,” she assented. Then, with a touch of concern, “You mustn't feel badly. He never means to hurt anybody's feelings,” she added, and looked earnestly into Elias Bacharach's face. That look caused him a sensation, the like of which he had never experienced before. His lip trembled. His breath quickened. His heart leaped. “Thank--thank you,” he said, with none but the most confused notion of what he said, or why he said it. Pretty soon he took his leave. ***** Elias dwelt in East Fifteenth Street. The house faced Stuyvesant Park. In this house, March 22, 1856, Elias had been born. In this house, May 13, 1856, Elias's father had died. In this house, alone with his mother and her brother, the Reverend Dr. Felix Gedaza, rabbi to the Congregation Gates of Pearl, Elias had lived till he was twenty-four years old. Then his mother, too, had died. Since then, he and the rabbi had kept bachelor's hall. It was a large, old-fashioned, red-brick house, very plain and respectable of exterior, and very bare, sombre and silent within. Elias had converted the front room on the top floor into a studio. Thus he had a north light and a wide view. In his childhood this room had been his play-room. During his boyhood it had been his bed-room. Now it was his work-room--consequently his living-room, in the most vital sense of the word. Its four walls had watched him grow up. The view from its window had been his daily comrade, ever since he had been old enough to have any comrade at all. In a manner, it had been his confidant and his counselor, too. It was his habit, whenever he had any thing on his mind, to station himself at that window, and look off across the park, and think it out. Hither he had come in sickness and in health, in joy and in sorrow, in the blackest moments of his discouragement, in the brightest moments of his hope. Here he had solved many a doubt, confronted many a disappointment, built many an air-castle, registered many a vow. He was twenty-six years old. Not a phase or episode of his development, but was associated in his memory with that view.