not be obliged to confess his narrow escape to his wife till the incident was some days old and she could bear it better.  It quite drove Lindau’s death out of his mind for the moment; and when Dryfoos said if he was going home he would drive up to the first cross-street and turn back with him, March said he would be glad if he would take him to a hat-store.  The old man put his head out again and told the driver to take them to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.  “There’s a hat-store around there somewhere, seems to me,” he said; and they talked of March’s accident as well as they could in the rattle and clatter of the street till they reached the place.  March got his hat, passing a joke with the hatter about the impossibility of pressing his old hat over again, and came out to thank Dryfoos and take leave of him.

“If you ain’t in any great hurry,” the old man said, “I wish you’d get in here a minute.  I’d like to have a little talk with you.”

“Oh, certainly,” said March, and he thought:  “It’s coming now about what he intends to do with ‘Every Other Week.’  Well, I might as well have all the misery at once and have it over.”

Dryfoos called up to his driver, who bent his head down sidewise to listen:  “Go over there on Madison Avenue, onto that asphalt, and keep drivin’ up and down till I stop you.  I can’t hear myself think on these pavements,” he said to March.  But after they got upon the asphalt, and began smoothly rolling over it, he seemed in no haste to begin.  At last he said, “I wanted to talk with you about that—­that Dutchman that was at my dinner—­Lindau,” and March’s heart gave a jump with wonder whether he could already have heard of Lindau’s death; but in an instant he perceived that this was impossible.  “I been talkin’ with Fulkerson about him, and he says they had to take the balance of his arm off.”

March nodded; it seemed to him he could not speak.  He could not make out from the close face of the old man anything of his motive.  It was set, but set as a piece of broken mechanism is when it has lost the power to relax itself.  There was no other history in it of what the man had passed through in his son’s death.

“I don’t know,” Dryfoos resumed, looking aside at the cloth window-strap, which he kept fingering, “as you quite understood what made me the maddest.  I didn’t tell him I could talk Dutch, because I can’t keep it up with a regular German; but my father was Pennsylvany Dutch, and I could understand what he was saying to you about me.  I know I had no business to understood it, after I let him think I couldn’t but I did, and I didn’t like very well to have a man callin’ me a traitor and a tyrant at my own table.  Well, I look at it differently now, and I reckon I had better have tried to put up with it; and I would, if I could have known—­” He stopped with a quivering lip, and then went on:  “Then, again, I didn’t like his talkin’ that paternalism of his.  I always heard it was the worst kind