Page:The Blind Bow-Boy (IA blindbowboy00vanv).pdf/52

 to take a cherry taxi. He is very particular about that. I wasin sucha hurry. . . I was late for my piano lesson. . . I took a pistache taxi. There was no other about. It is my fault. Father says that the cherry taxis never have accidents.

That's nonsense. The truck ran into you; you didn't run into it. What happened might just as easily have happened to a Rolls-Royce.

Her manner did not indicate that she was ungrateful for his sympathy; nevertheless, she appeared to be inconsolable, and continued to sob intermittently. Nor did she speak again until they reached her door, when with a muttered. Thank you, and the slight flutter of a gloved hand, she descended and disappeared in a brown-stone house, before the difident Harold had time to give utterance to even one of the hundred different remarks that were surging inarticulately in his brain. He gazed at the closed door. Something seemed to have come into his life and to have gone out of it again. As the taxi drove away he leaned back against the cushions and wiped his temples for the second time that warm June afternoon. He was, indeed, so bewildered by the events of the day that his head began to ache violently.

Presently, his taxi stopped before an apartment house on East Eighteenth Street, and he remembered that he had one more ordeal to go through. The boy in the elevator, a Spaniard, was most obsequious. He had quite evidently been