“Here, you damn fool—­that’s not my order,” he snapped out.

Dickie tasted a homely memory—­“Dickie damn fool.”  He stood silent a moment looking down with one of his quaint, impersonal looks.

“Well, sir,” then he said slowly, “it ain’t your order, but you look a whole lot more like a feller that would order Spanish omelette than like a feller that would order Hamburger steak.”

For the first time the man turned about, flung his arm over his chair-back, and looked up at Dickie.  In fact, he stared.  His thin lips, enclosed in an ill-tempered parenthesis of double lines, twisted themselves slightly.

“I’ll be derned!” he said.  “But, look here, my man, I didn’t order Hamburger steak; I ordered chicken.”

Dickie deliberately smoothed down the cowlick on his head.  He wore his look of a seven-year-old with which he was wont to face the extremity of Sylvester’s exasperation.

“I reckon I clean forgot your order, sir,” he said.  “I figured out that you wouldn’t be caring what was on your plate.  This heat,” he added, “sure puts a blinder on a feller’s memory.”

The man laughed shortly.  “It’s all right,” he said.  “This’ll go down.”

He ate in silence.  Then he glanced up again.  “What are you waiting for, anyway?”

Dickie flushed faintly.  “I was sort of wishful to see how it would go down.”

“Oh, I don’t mean that kind of waiting.  I mean—­why are you a waiter in this—­hash-hole?”

Dickie meditated.  “There ain’t no answer to that,” he said.  “I don’t know why—­” He added—­“Why anything.  It’s a sort of extry word in the dictionary—­don’t mean much any way you look at it.”

He gathered up the dishes.  The man watched him, tilting back a little in his chair, his eyes twinkling under brows drawn together.  A moment afterwards he left the restaurant.

It was a few nights later when Dickie saw him again—­or rather when Dickie was again seen by him.  This time Dickie was not in the restaurant.  He was at a table in a small Free Library near Greenwich Avenue, and he was copying painstakingly with one hand from a fat volume which he held down with the other.  The strong, heavily-shaded light made a circle of brilliance about him; his fair hair shone silvery bright, his face had a sort of seraphic pallor.  The orderer of chicken, striding away from the desk with a hastily obtained book of reference, stopped short and stared at him; then came close and touched the thin, shiny shoulder of the blue serge coat.

“This the way you take your pleasure?” he asked abruptly.

Dickie looked up slowly, and his consciousness seemed to travel even more slowly back from the fairy doings of a midsummer night.  Under the observant eyes bent upon it, his face changed extraordinarily from the face of untroubled, almost immortal childhood to the face of struggling and reserved manhood.

“Hullo,” he said with a smile of recognition.  “Well—­yes—­not always.”