Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/309

Rh strong spirit, living aloof from the weakness of humanity; and he was willing to let her go without a word of kindliness or reconciliation.

She went. He stood up, dazed and shaken. He stumbled out into the hall to look after her. There, all the living curiosities, exhibitors, and platform entertainers were cursing and despairing together like the passengers on a sinking ship. Their wages were lost; their trunks, their properties, their trained animals and their poor exhibits were all held by the law. They faced bankruptcy and want. And the Professor, the captain of the wreck, stood for a moment pale before that hubbub, and then retreated from it, down the back stairs, into the street.

He wandered about desolately, till fatigue drove him home to his empty rooms. She had been there. Her trunk was gone and all of her small furnishings that could be packed into it. On the back of an envelope, hung on a gas-jet where he could be sure to see it, she had scrawled: "Good-by."

He left it there.

He left it there and left the gas burning, and—as a final expression of his mood—went to bed in his clothes, with his shoes on.

That was some years ago. Every trace of the old Bowery Musée is gone now—gone with the public that used to patronize it and the conditions that kept it alive. A penny savings-bank has been built on its site. Madame Carlotta and young Redney have disappeared