“I wish there were!” said her husband, fervently.
“On second thought, I’m not at all sure I do!” she said, laughing.
They went back now into the living-room and sank down in armchairs, Nell with a cigarette. She had looked first to be sure that the curtains were down so that she was not visible from the street. “No,” said Jerome, “we’d better not consider either of us taking it. It would be a waste not to stick to the lines we’ve been trained for. I suppose it’s just a pipe dream to think I can find exactly the right person. But you can bet your last cent I won’t tie up for any long contract to anybody who isn’t exactly the right person. I’ve got a hunch that some day the right one will walk into the store and let me lasso her. And I’ve faith enough in my hunch to believe I’ll know her when I see her, and. …”
“Isn’t that the phone?” asked his wife, suspending her cigarette in midair.
“Oh, Lord! I hope not, just when we’re settled for the evening!” cried her husband.
“I’ll answer it,” she said, going out into the hall.
When she came back she looked grave. “Oh, Jerome, what do you think? That Mr. Knapp has just had a terrible accident, they say. Fell off a roof and killed himself.”
Jerome’s impulse was to cry out blamingly, “Isn’t that just like him! Why couldn’t he choose some other time!” But he repressed this decently. “Well, what do you think we ought to do?” he asked Nell.
He was frightfully tired. The idea of stirring out of his chair appalled him. But he wanted to establish a tradition in the town that the store looked after its employees like a father.
She hesitated. “Let me run upstairs and start the children to bed. I believe we’d better go around to their house and offer to do anything we can to help out.”
VIII
As they stepped quickly along in the dark, they tried to piece together the chronology of the late afternoon for Knapp and decided that this tragic ending to his feeble life must have come even before he could have seen his wife to tell her of his dismissal from the store. “I’m so glad of that!” said Nell Willing, softly. “Now she need never know.”
Her husband gave a hearty inward assent. It was the devil anyhow to be so intimately concerned in other people’s lives as an employer was.
They found the little house alight from top to bottom, and full of people, whispering, moving about restlessly and foolishly, starting and turning their heads at any noise from upstairs. An old woman, who said she was the Knapps’ next-door neighbor and most intimate friend, stopped crying long enough to tell them in a loud whisper that the doctor said Mr. Knapp was still alive, but unconscious, and dying from an injury to the spine. The children, she said, had been taken away by a sort of relative, Mrs. Mattie Farnham, who would keep them till the funeral. Asked about Mrs. Knapp, she replied that Mrs. Knapp was with the doctor and her dying husband and was, as always, a marvel of self-possession and calm. “As long as there’s anything to do, Mrs. Knapp will be right there to do it,” she said. “She’s a wonderful woman, Mrs. Knapp is.”
The Willings sat for a time, awkwardly waiting, with the other people awkwardly waiting, and then went away, leaving behind them a card on which Jerome had penciled the request to be allowed to be useful in any way possible “to the family of a highly respected member of the Emporium staff.”
As they walked home through the darkness, they exchanged impressions. “That old neighbor’s head is just like a snake’s, didn’t you think?” said Jerome.
“She seemed very sympathetic, I thought,” said Nell extenuatingly.
“She did seem to think a lot of Mrs. Knapp,” admitted Jerome.
“All the women in St. Peter’s do,” said Nell. “Mrs. Prouty says she doesn’t know what they would do in parish work if it weren’t for Mrs. Knapp. She’s one of the workers, you know. And a good headpiece too.”
“I imagine she’s had to develop those qualities or starve to death,” conjectured Jerome, forgetting for an instant that the man he was criticizing lay at the point of death.
The memory of this kept them silent for a moment and then Nell asked, “Did you notice that living-room?”
“You bet your life I did,” said her husband with a lively professional interest. “The only living-room I’ve seen in this town that had any style to it. Did you see that sofa? And those curtains?”
“They say she’s a wonderful housekeeper. The kind who stays right at home and sticks to her job. You never see her out except at church.”
“No, I don’t believe I’ve ever laid eyes on her,” said Jerome.
“And people are always talking about how beautifully her children are brought up. With real manners, you know. And such perfect ways at table. How do you suppose she does it?”
“What did she ever see in Knapp?” Jerome cast out the age-old question with the invariable, ever-fresh accent of amazement which belongs with it.
“Oh, they married very young,” said thirty-year-old Mrs. Willing wisely. “I believe he hadn’t finished his course at the State University. He was specializing in English literature.”
“He would!” ejaculated Jerome, pregnantly.
His wife laughed. And then they both remembered again that the man was dying.
When they heard through Dr. Merritt that poor Lester Knapp would not die but would be a bedridden invalid, a dead-weight on his wife, the Willings along with everybody else in town were aghast at the fatal way in which bad luck seems to heap up on certain unfortunate beings.
“That poor wife of his! What has she ever done to deserve such a tragic life!” cried young Mrs. Willing pityingly.
“For the Lord’s sake, what’s going to keep them from being dependent on public
