To-day he whistled over his work, thinking of Julia.  They were to meet at three o’clock, “just to bum,” as the girl said, laughing.  Mark thought that, as the season was well forward, they might take a car to the park or the beach, but the plan had been left indefinite.

He ate his lunch, of butterless bread and sausage, and an entire five-cent pie, in a piano wareroom, taking great bites, with dreamy studying of the walls and long delays between.  Then he wandered down through the empty offices—­it was Saturday afternoon and Pomeroy and Parke closed promptly at twelve—­had a brief chat with the Japanese janitor, and washed his hands and combed his hair very conscientiously in the president’s own lavatory.

At half-past one he went into one of the glass showrooms, a prettily furnished apartment whose most notable article of furniture was a grand piano in exquisitely matched Circassian walnut.  Absorbed and radiant, Mark put back the cover, twirled the stool, and carefully opened a green book marked “Chopin.”  Then he sat down, and, with the sigh of a happy child falling upon a feast, he struck an opening chord.

The big flexible fingers still needed training, but they showed the result of hours and hours of patient practice, too.  Through his seven years in the music house, Mark had been faithful to his gift.  He made no secret of it, his associates knew that he came back after dinner to the very rooms that they themselves left so eagerly at the end of the day.  Mark had indeed once asked old Mr. Pomeroy to hear him play, an occasion to which the boy still looked back with hot shame.  For when his obliging old employer had settled himself to listen after hours on an appointed afternoon, and Mark had opened the piano, the performer suddenly found his spine icy, his hands wet and clumsy.  He felt as if he had never touched a piano before; the attempt was a failure from the first note, as Mark well knew.  When he had finished he whisked open another book.

“That was rotten,” he stammered.  “I thought I could do it—­I can’t.  But just let me play you this—­”

But the great man was in a hurry, it appeared.

“No—­no, my boy, not to-day—­some other time!  Perhaps a little bit too ambitious a choice, eh?  We must all be ambitious, but we must know our limitations, too.  Some other time!”

Then Mr. Pomeroy was gone and Mark left to bitterest reflection.

But he recovered very sensibly from his boyish chagrin, and very sensibly went at his practicing again.  On this particular Saturday afternoon he attacked a certain phrase in the bass, and for almost an hour the big fingers of his left hand rippled over it steadily.  Mark, twisted about halfway on the bench, watched the performance steadily, his right hand hanging loose.

“Damn!” he said presently, with a weary sigh, as a sharp and familiar little pain sprang into his left wrist.

“Mark!” breathed a reproachful voice behind him.  He whirled about, to see Julia Page.