“We might call the police—­”

“Oh, Emily—­”

“Well, if you can suggest anything better.  We must close the shop.”

“We might put him in a taxi—­and send him home.”

“He probably hasn’t any home.”

“Don’t be so pessimistic—­he certainly has money.”

“You don’t know where he got it.  You can’t be too careful, Jean—­”

The girl, touching the old man’s shoulder, asked, “Where do you live?”

He murmured indistinctly.

“Where?” she bent her ear down to him.

Waking, he sang: 

  “Two little soldiers, blowing up a Hun—­
  The darned thing—­exploded—­
  And then there was—­One—­”

“Oh, Emily, did you ever hear anything so funny?”

Emily couldn’t see the funny side of it.  It was tragic and it was disconcerting.  “I don’t know what to do.  Perhaps you’d better call a taxi.”

“He’s shivering, Emily.  I believe I’ll make him a cup of chocolate.”

“Dear child, it will be a lot of trouble—­”

“I’d like to do it—­really.”

“Very well.”  Emily was not unsympathetic, but she had had a rather wearing life.  Her love of toys and of little children had kept her human, otherwise she had a feeling that she might have hardened into chill spinsterhood.

As Jean disappeared through the door, the elder woman moved about the shop, setting it in order for the night.  It was a labor of love to put the dolls to bed, to lock the glass doors safely on the puffy rabbits and woolly dogs and round-eyed cats, to close the drawers on the tea-sets and Lilliputian kitchens, to shut into boxes the tin soldiers that their queer old customer had craved.

For more than a decade Emily Bridges had kept the shop.  Originally it had been a Thread and Needle Shop, supplying people who did not care to go downtown for such wares.

Then one Christmas she had put in a few things to attract the children.  The children had come, and gradually there had been more toys—­until at last she had found herself the owner of a Toy Shop, with the thread and needle and other staid articles stuck negligently in the background.

Yet in the last three years it had been hard to keep up the standard which she had set for herself.  Toys were made in Germany, and the men who had made them were in the trenches, the women who had helped were in the fields—­the days when the bisque babies had smiled on happy working-households were over.  There was death and darkness where once the rollicking clowns and dancing dolls had been set to mechanical music.

Jean, coming back with the chocolate, found Emily with a great white plush elephant in her arms.  His trappings were of red velvet and there was much gold; he was the last of a line of assorted sizes.

There had always been a white elephant in Miss Emily’s window.  Painfully she had seen her supply dwindle.  For this last of the herd, she had a feeling far in excess of his value, such as a collector might have for a rare coin of a certain minting, or a bit of pottery of a pre-historic period.