A gray squirrel came crawling and nosing through the fresh grass; he caught its eyes, and, though the little animal was plainly bound elsewhere on important business, the young man soon had it curled up on his knee, asleep.

For a while he amused himself by using his curious power, alternately waking the squirrel and allowing it to bound off, tail twitching, and then calling it back, slowly but inexorably to climb his trousers and curl up on his knee and sleep an uncanny and deep sleep which might end only at the young man’s pleasure.

He, too, began to feel the subtle stillness of the drowsing woodland; musing there, caressing his short, crisp mustache, he watched the purple grackle walking about in iridescent solitude, the sun spots waning and glowing on the grass; he heard the soft, garrulous whimper of waterfowl along the water’s edge, the stir of leaves above.

He thought of various personal matters:  his poverty, the low ebb of his balance at the bank, his present profession, his approaching debut as an entertainer, the chances of his failure.  He thought, too, of the astounding change in his life, the future, vacant of promise, devoid of meaning, a future so utterly new and blank that he could find in it nothing to speculate upon.  He thought also, and perfectly impersonally, of a girl whom he had met now and then upon the stairs of the apartment house which he now inhabited.

Evidently there had been an ebb in her prosperity; the tumble of a New Yorker’s fortune leads from the Avenue to the Eighties, from thence through Morristown, Staten Island, to the West Side.  Besides, she painted pictures; he knew the aroma of fixitive, siccative, and burnt sienna; and her studio adjoined his sky drawing-room.

He thought of this girl quite impersonally; she resembled a youthful beauty he had known—­might still know if he chose; for a man who can pay for his evening clothes need never deny himself the society he was bred to.

She certainly did resemble that girl—­she had the same bluish violet eyes, the same white and deeply fringed lids, the same free grace of carriage, a trifle too boyish at times—­the same firmly rounded, yet slender, figure.

“Now, as a matter of fact,” he mused aloud, stroking the sleeping squirrel on his knee, “I could have fallen in love with either of those girls—­before Copper blew up.”

Pursuing his innocuous meditation he nodded to himself:  “I rather like the poor one better than any girl I ever saw.  Doubtless she paints portraits over solar prints.  That’s all right; she’s doing more than I have done yet....  I approve of those eyes of hers; they’re like the eyes of that waking Aphrodite in the Luxembourg.  If she would only just look at me once instead of looking through me when we pass one another in the hall——­”

The deadened gallop of a horse on the bridle path caught his ear.  The horse was coming fast—­almost too fast.  He laid the sleeping squirrel on the bench, listened, then instinctively stood up and walked to the thicket’s edge.