What were they, what are they, the Chataways, anyhow?  I don’t even yet know, I confess; but now I don’t want to—­I don’t care a hang, having no further use for them whatever.  But on one of the Park benches, in the golden morning, the wonderment added, I remember, to my joy, for we hadn’t, Lorraine and I, been the least bit overwhelmed about them:  Lorraine only pretending a little, with her charming elfish art, that she occasionally was, in order to see how far Eliza would go.  Well, that brilliant woman had gone pretty far for us, truly, if, after all, they were only in the manicure line.  She was a-doing of it, as Lorraine says, my massive lady was, in the “parlor” where I don’t suppose it’s usually done; and aren’t there such places, precisely, as Manicure Parlors, where they do nothing else, or at least are supposed to?  Oh, I do hope, for the perfection of it, that this may be what Eliza has kept from us!  Otherwise, by all the gods, it’s just a boarding-house:  there was exactly the smell in the hall, the boarding-house smell, that pervaded my old greasy haunt of the League days:  that boiled atmosphere that seems to belong at once, confusedly, to a domestic “wash” and to inferior food—­as if the former were perhaps being prepared in the saucepan and the latter in the tubs.

There also came back to me, I recollect, that note of Mrs. Chataway’s queer look at me on my saying I was Eliza’s nephew—­the droll effect of her making on her side a discovery about me.  Yes, she made it, and as against me, of course, against all of us, at sight of me; so that if Eliza has bragged at Eastridge about New York, she has at least bragged in New York about Eastridge.  I didn’t clearly, for Mrs. Chataway, come up to the brag—­or perhaps rather didn’t come down to it:  since I dare say the poor lady’s consternation meant simply that my aunt has confessed to me but as an unconsidered trifle, a gifted child at the most; or as young and handsome and dashing at the most, and not as—­well, as what I am.  Whatever I am, in any case, and however awkward a document as nephew to a girlish aunt, I believe I really tasted of the joy of life in its highest intensity when, at the end of twenty minutes of the Park, I suddenly saw my absurd presentiment of a miracle justified.

I could of course scarce believe my eyes when, at the turn of a quiet alley, pulling up to gape, I recognized in a young man brooding on a bench ten yards off the precious personality of Harry Goward!  There he languished alone, our feebler fugitive, handed over to me by a mysterious fate and a well-nigh incredible hazard.  There is certainly but one place in all New York where the stricken deer may weep—­or even, for that matter, the hart ungalled play; the wonder of my coincidence shrank a little, that is, before the fact that when young ardor or young despair wishes to commune with immensity it can only do so either in a hall bedroom or in just this corner, practically, where I pounced on my prey.  To sit down, in short, you’ve got to sit there; there isn’t another square inch of the whole place over which you haven’t got, as everything shrieks at you, to step lively.  Poor Goward, I could see at a glance, wanted very much to sit down—­looked indeed very much as if he wanted never, never again to get up.