Page:MacGrath--The luck of the Irish.djvu/350

 Two little tan shoes flitting past his cellar window … and then this! A seven-dollar meerschaum pipe and a ticket around the world in his pocket! He laughed. Instead of the usual "God bless our home" he was going to have "The luck of the Irish" done in blue and red yarn—that is, if Ruth did not object.

Where were Greenwood and Clausen, the lovable old archæologists? Would he ever see them again? He recalled the Arab boy in Cairo, the ride to Suez, the big storm. … Married and settled down! And when he came home nights she'd play for him on the piano, those strange skin-tingling melodies she knew so much about. And there was that Jaipur elephant with the rheumatic leg!

Ruth, who had gone shopping, ought to be coming along soon. They were to sail at nine that night for Hong-Kong and home.

Ambition. How he was going to work when he got back to New York! Burns, Dolan & Co. had loomed very big once upon a time; but now he knew it to be only a step; and there would be other steps, each one higher than the other; and before he rested he was going up high. He knew it; there wasn't a particle of doubt in his mind.

There was only a speck in the amber. They would have to wait a little while for that home with the garden. Four thousand; that was a lot of money just then. That and a small mortgage would have built his castle from moat to turret.