“To another institution with a little more garden space?” Fred queried, pensively.

Monet shrugged.  “Perhaps...  Who knows?”

* * * * *

There followed another week of idleness, and one day, as Fred Starratt was dawdling in the sun, Harrison came up to him and said: 

“The head waiter in the dining room at Ward Six goes out to-morrow.  Would you like his job?”

“Like it?” Fred found himself echoing, incredulously.  “Can I begin at once ... now?”

Harrison chuckled with rare good nature.  “Well, to-morrow, anyway.  Just report in the kitchen after breakfast.”

He could hardly wait for the next morning to come.  He bungled things horribly at first.  It looked easy enough from the side lines—­bringing in the plates of steaming food, doling out sugar for the tea, passing the dishpan about at the end of the meal for the inmates to yield up their knives and forks.  But after the first day Fred was swept with a healing humility.  It was necessary for even the humblest occupation to be lighted with flickerings of skill.

He liked setting the table best, especially in the morning after the breakfast crowd had gone.  Then the sun was not yet too hot for comfort and the long dining room was bathed in a golden mist.  In a corner near one of the windows a canary hopped blithely about its bobbing cage and released its soul in a flood of song.  He would begin by laying the plates first, inverted, in long, precise rows.  Then carefully he would group the knives and forks about them.  Not only carefully, but slowly, so that the task might not be accomplished too readily.  And all the time his thoughts would be flying back and forth ... back and forth, like a weaver’s shuttle.  At first these thoughts would pound harshly; but gradually, under the spell of his busy hands, he would find his mental process growing less and less painful, until he would wake up suddenly and find that he had been day dreaming, escaping for a time into a heaven of forgetfulness.

Toward the end of the month a crew was picked among the inmates of Ward 6 to man a construction camp a few miles to the north where the state was building a dam.  Clancy was among the number, and Fordham and Wainright, junior.  Monet was offered the choice of assisting Fred Starratt in the dining room or going out with the kitchen staff to camp.  He chose the dining-room job.

The only personal news from the outside world came to Fred in a weekly letter from Helen, which arrived every Saturday night.  He used to tear the envelopes open viciously and read every word with cold disdain.  He never thought of answering one ... indeed, many a time he had an impulse to send them back unopened.  But curiosity always got the better hand.  Not that he found her news of such moment, but her dissimulation fascinated him.  She never chided him for not replying ... she never complained ... but every line was flavored with the self-justification of all essential falseness.  She was playing a game with herself as completely as if she had written the letters and then scribbled her own name upon the envelope.  She was looking forward to the day when she could say: