With a gigantic smoke-puff of disgust the man from Sleepy Eye stalked out, jingling the keys in his trousers pocket, cocking up his cigar, and looking as though he owned the restaurant.

Mr. Wrenn, picturing him greeting the Singer Tower from an incoming steamer, longed to see the tower.

“Gee!  I’ll do it!”

He rose and, from that table in the basement of an A. B. C. restaurant, he fled to America.

He dashed up-stairs, fidgeted while the cashier made his change, rang for a bus, whisked into his room, slammed his things into his suit-case, announced to it wildly that they were going home, and scampered to the Northwestem Station.  He walked nervously up and down till the Liverpool train departed.  “Suppose Istra wanted to make up, and came back to London?” was a terrifying thought that hounded him.  He dashed into the waiting-room and wrote to her, on a souvenir post-card showing the Abbey:  “Called back to America—­will write.  Address care of Souvenir Company, Twenty-eighth Street.”  But he didn’t mail the card.

Once settled in a second-class compartment, with the train in motion, he seemed already much nearer America, and, humming, to the great annoyance of a lady with bangs, he planned his new great work—­the making of friends; the discovery, some day, if Istra should not relent, of “somebody to go home to.”  There was no end to the “societies and lodges and stuff” he was going to join directly he landed.

At Liverpool he suddenly stopped at a post-box and mailed his card to Istra.  That ended his debate.  Of course after that he had to go back to America.

He sailed exultantly, one month and seventeen days after leaving Portland.

CHAPTER XII

HE DISCOVERS AMERICA

In his white-painted steerage berth Mr. Wrenn lay, with a scratch-pad on his raised knees and a small mean pillow doubled under his head, writing sample follow-up letters to present to the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company, interrupting his work at intervals to add to a list of the books which, beginning about five minutes after he landed in New York, he was going to master.  He puzzled over Marie Corelli.  Morton liked Miss Corelli so much; but would her works appeal to Istra Nash?

He had worked for many hours on a letter to Istra in which he avoided mention of such indecent matters as steerages and immigrants.  He was grateful, he told her, for “all you learned me,” and he had thought that Aengusmere was a beautiful place, though he now saw “what you meant about them interesting people,” and his New York address would be the Souvenir Company.

He tore up the several pages that repeated that oldest most melancholy cry of the lover, which rang among the deodars, from viking ships, from the moonlit courtyards of Provence, the cry which always sounded about Mr. Wrenn as he walked the deck:  “I want you so much; I miss you so unendingly; I am so lonely for you, dear.”  For no more clearly, no more nobly did the golden Aucassin or lean Dante word that cry in their thoughts than did Mr. William Wrenn, Our Mr. Wrenn.