Just now, however, a veritable catastrophe occurred.  The little old dressmaker changed her basket to her other arm at precisely the wrong moment, and Old Grannis, hastening to pass, removing his hat in a hurried salutation, struck it with his fore arm, knocking it from her grasp, and sending it rolling and bumping down the stairs.  The sole fell flat upon the first landing; the lentils scattered themselves over the entire flight; while the cabbage, leaping from step to step, thundered down the incline and brought up against the street door with a shock that reverberated through the entire building.

The little retired dressmaker, horribly vexed, nervous and embarrassed, was hard put to it to keep back the tears.  Old Grannis stood for a moment with averted eyes, murmuring:  “Oh, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.  I—­I really—­I beg your pardon, really—­really.”

Marcus Schouler, coming down stairs from his room, saved the situation.

“Hello, people,” he cried.  “By damn! you’ve upset your basket—­you have, for a fact.  Here, let’s pick um up.”  He and Old Grannis went up and down the flight, gathering up the fish, the lentils, and the sadly battered cabbage.  Marcus was raging over the pusillanimity of Alexander, of which Maria had just told him.

“I’ll cut him in two—­with the whip,” he shouted.  “I will, I will, I say I will, for a fact.  He wouldn’t fight, hey?  I’ll give um all the fight he wants, nasty, mangy cur.  If he won’t fight he won’t eat.  I’m going to get the butcher’s bull pup and I’ll put um both in a bag and shake um up.  I will, for a fact, and I guess Alec will fight.  Come along, Mister Grannis,” and he took the old Englishman away.

Little Miss Baker hastened to her room and locked herself in.  She was excited and upset during all the rest of the day, and listened eagerly for Old Grannis’s return that evening.  He went instantly to work binding up “The Breeder and Sportsman,” and back numbers of the “Nation.”  She heard him softly draw his chair and the table on which he had placed his little binding apparatus close to the wall.  At once she did the same, brewing herself a cup of tea.  All through that evening the two old people “kept company” with each other, after their own peculiar fashion.  “Setting out with each other” Miss Baker had begun to call it.  That they had been presented, that they had even been forced to talk together, had made no change in their relative positions.  Almost immediately they had fallen back into their old ways again, quite unable to master their timidity, to overcome the stifling embarrassment that seized upon them when in each other’s presence.  It was a sort of hypnotism, a thing stronger than themselves.  But they were not altogether dissatisfied with the way things had come to be.  It was their little romance, their last, and they were living through it with supreme enjoyment and calm contentment.