This is strange." Still as her
ear caught no sound of him, Santa sprang up and slipped, guitar in
hand, to the outer door--the fence being too tall for her to
over-pry, and moreover prickly. She opened the door and peeped out.
There was no one down the pathway. There was no one up the pathway,
which here, for some fifty or sixty yards, climbed straight, full in
view. "And what on earth has become of him?" wondered Santa.
"He did not go down--I should have heard him. But why should he go
up? He has broken with those drinkers at Engelbaum's. . . . Besides,
it is unbelievable that, in this short time, he should have vanished.
. . ."
So much for guesswork. Now I come back to the story as it was
afterwards related to me.
Santa, standing there in the porch, guitar in hand and leaning
forward over the rail which guarded a long flight of stone
steps, heard a footfall on the road below--an ascending footfall.
For a moment she mistook it for Farrell's: she believed she could
distinguish Farrell's from any other man's: and so for a moment she
stood mystified.
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