to molest it.  In their simple Sunday best, March thought them very quiet, decent-looking people, and he could well believe that they had nothing to do with the riotous outbreaks in other parts of the city.  He could hardly believe that there were any such outbreaks; he began more and more to think them mere newspaper exaggerations in the absence of any disturbance, or the disposition to it, that he could see.  He walked on to the East River.

Avenues A, B, and C presented the same quiet aspect as Second Avenue; groups of men stood on the corners, and now and then a police-laden car was brought unmolested down the tracks before them; they looked at it and talked together, and some laughed, but there was no trouble.

March got a cross-town car, and came back to the West Side.  A policeman, looking very sleepy and tired, lounged on the platform.

“I suppose you’ll be glad when this cruel war is over,” March suggested, as he got in.

The officer gave him a surly glance and made him no answer.

His behavior, from a man born to the joking give and take of our life, impressed March.  It gave him a fine sense of the ferocity which he had read of the French troops putting on toward the populace just before the coup d’etat; he began to feel like the populace; but he struggled with himself and regained his character of philosophical observer.  In this character he remained in the car and let it carry him by the corner where he ought to have got out and gone home, and let it keep on with him to one of the farthermost tracks westward, where so much of the fighting was reported to have taken place.  But everything on the way was as quiet as on the East Side.

Suddenly the car stopped with so quick a turn of the brake that he was half thrown from his seat, and the policeman jumped down from the platform and ran forward.

IV

Dryfoos sat at breakfast that morning with Mrs. Mandel as usual to pour out his coffee.  Conrad had gone down-town; the two girls lay abed much later than their father breakfasted, and their mother had gradually grown too feeble to come down till lunch.  Suddenly Christine appeared at the door.  Her face was white to the edges of her lips, and her eyes were blazing.

“Look here, father!  Have you been saying anything to Mr. Beaton?”

The old man looked up at her across his coffee-cup through his frowning brows.  “No.”

Mrs. Mandel dropped her eyes, and the spoon shook in her hand.

“Then what’s the reason he don’t come here any more?” demanded the girl; and her glance darted from her father to Mrs. Mandel.  “Oh, it’s you, is it?  I’d like to know who told you to meddle in other people’s business?”

“I did,” said Dryfoos, savagely.  “I told her to ask him what he wanted here, and he said he didn’t want anything, and he stopped coming.  That’s all.  I did it myself.”