not one of them more than five minutes’ walk away; and just round the corner there are more.  I want to go home!  I want to take one large, unparalleled leap from here and come down at the corner I told you about.  D’you know what I’d do?  We’ll say it’s 7 P.M. and beginning to get dark.  I’d dive into the Knickerbocker—­that’s the hotel that the bright and happy people go to for dinner or supper—­and I’d engage a table up on the terrace.  Then I’d telephone to a little friend of mine whose name is Doe—­John Doe—­and in about ten minutes he’d have left the crowd he was standing in line with and he’d come galloping up, that glad to see me you’d cry to watch him.  We’d go up on the terrace, where the potted palms grow, for our dinner, and the tables all around us would be full of people that would know Johnnie Doe and me, and they’d all make us drink drinks and tell us how glad they were to see us aboard again.  And after dinner,” said young Arthur Benham, with wide and smiling eyes—­“after dinner we’d go to see one of the roof-garden shows.  Let me tell you they’ve got the Marigny or the Ambassadeurs or the Jardin de Paris beaten to a pulp—­to—­a—­pulp!  And after the show we’d slip round to the stage-door—­you bet we would!—­and capture the two most beautiful ladies in the world and take ’em off to supper.”

He wrinkled his young brow in great perplexity.  “Now I wonder,” said he, anxiously—­“I wonder where we’d go for supper.  You see,” he apologized, “it’s two years since I left the Real Street, and, gee! what a lot can happen on Broadway in two years!  There’s probably half a dozen new supper-places that I don’t know anything about, and one of them’s the place where the crowd goes.  Well, anyhow, we’d go to that place, and there’d be a band playing, and the electric fans would go round and round, and Johnnie Doe and I and the two most beautiful ladies would put it all over the other pikers there.”

Young Benham gave a little sigh of pleasure and excitement.  “That’s what I’d like to do to-night,” said he, “and that’s what I’ll do, you can bet your sh—­boots, when all this silly mess is over and I’m a free man.  I’ll hike back to good old Broadway, and if ever you see any one trying to pry me loose from it again you can laugh yourself to death, because he’ll never, never succeed.

“That’s where I’ll go,” he said, nodding, “when this waiting is over—­straight back to Liberty Land and the bright lights.  The rest of the family can stay here till they die, if they want to—­and I suppose they do—­I’m going home as soon as I’ve got my money.  Old Charlie’ll manage all that for me.  He’ll get a lawyer to look after it, and I won’t have to see anybody in the family at all.

“Nine more weeks shut in by stone walls!” said the boy, staring about him with a sort of bitterness.  “Nine weeks more!”

“Is it so hard as that?” asked the girl.

There was no foolish coquetry in her tone.  She spoke as if the words involved no personal question at all, but there was a little smile at her lips, and Arthur Benham turned toward her quickly and caught at her hands.