failed signally to do so. Lora Delane Porter beamed graciously upon
him, like a pleased Providence, but the rest of his circle of
acquaintances were ill at ease.
The statement does not include Hank Jardine, for Hank was out of New
York; but the others, Shanklyn, the actor; Wren, the newspaper-man;
Bryce, Johnson, Willis, Appleton, and the rest, sensed impending change
in the air, and were uneasy, like cattle before a thunder-storm. The
fact that the visits of Mrs. Porter and Ruth to inquire after George,
now of daily occurrence, took place in the afternoon, while they,
Kirk's dependents, seldom or never appeared in the studio till drawn
there by the scent of the evening meal, it being understood that during
the daytime Kirk liked to work undisturbed, kept them ignorant of the
new development.
All they knew was that during the last two weeks a subtle change had
taken place in Kirk. He was less genial, more prone to irritability
than of old. He had developed fits of absent-mindedness, and was
frequently to be found staring pensively at nothing. To slap him on the
back at such moments, as Wren ventured to do on one occasion, Wren
belonging to the jovial school of thought which holds that nature gave
us hands in order to slap backs, was to bring forth a new and
unexpected Kirk, a Kirk who scowled and snarled and was hardly to be
appeased with apology. Stranger still, this new Kirk could be summoned
into existence by precisely the type of story at which, but a few weeks
back, he would have been the first to laugh.
Percy Shanklyn, whose conversation consisted of equal parts of
autobiography and of stories of the type alluded to, was the one to
discover this. His latest, which he had counted on to set the table in
a roar, produced from Kirk criticism so adverse and so crisply
delivered that he refrained from telling his latest but one and spent
the rest of the evening wondering, like his fellow visitors, what had
happened to Kirk and whether he was sickening for something.
Not one of them had the faintest suspicion that these symptoms
indicated that Kirk, for the first time in his easy-going life, was in
love. They had never contemplated such a prospect. It was not till his
conscientious and laborious courtship had been in progress for over two
weeks and was nearing the stage when he felt that the possibility of
revealing his state of mind to Ruth was not so remote as it had been,
that a chance visit of Percy Shanklyn to the studio during the
afternoon solved the mystery.
One calls it a chance visit because Percy had not been meaning to
borrow twenty dollars from Kirk that day at all. The man slated for the
loan was one Burrows, a kindly member of the Lambs Club. But fate and a
telegram from a manager removed Burrows to Chicago, while Percy was
actually circling preparatory to the swoop, and the only other man in
New York who seemed to Percy good for the necessary sum at that precise
moment was Kirk.
He flew to Kirk and found him with Ruth. Kirk's utter absence of any
enthusiasm at the sight of him, the reluctance with which he made
the introduction, the glumness with which he bore his share of the
three-cornered conversation, all these things convinced Percy that
