cheated at the monotonous row of blinddrawn, bay windowed houses. The newsboy had come and gone, even the baker's cart had departed. At each doorstep lay a carefully twisted newspaper and a loaf of bread.

Peter Findlay's home street was an old-fashioned affair. The houses were two-storied, with square, uncompromising head-pieces like women of the eighties who gloried in false fronts. Flights of dark-blue steps bridged the distance between sidewalk and the first floors; the front doors were grained in imitation of oak; fuchsias were growing on either side of the basement windows.

It had never occurred to Peter Findlay to live anywhere else in San Francisco, although all the old neighbors had long since moved away. He didn't like flats; he wouldn't live in apartments; he had installed electric lights under protest. His father had lived there before him when the Western Addition was considered the last word in civic expansion, and Findlay liked to fancy that there was a commendable sentiment, a certain stamina, in denying the lure of steam heat, and hardwood floors, and ceilings lowered to genial coziness. Yes, Peter Findlay had decided convictions about his home, as well as about the rules that should govern the conduct of a gentleman. Besides, his salary of one hundred and fifty dollars for taking charge of the note department of the Fidelity Bank did not permit of many extravagances not for a man with a wife and two children; and an old-fashioned, two-storied, bay-windowed house, with fuchsias hugging the basement walls, that nobody in his right senses would think of buying, helped out considerably.

There were inconsistencies, of course, in the cautious economies of the Findlay family. There was the automobile, for instance. Peter Findlay had argued himself into this luxury on the score of needing fresh air. His wife had objected a bit wistfully, as if the advent of a car postponed indefinitely her hopes for a modern dwelling-place filled with vacuum cleaners, and fireless cookers, and electric toasters, and all such inanimate recruiters for women's clubs.

On this August morning, as Peter

Findlay backed his car as noiselessly as possible into the basement of his shabby home, the final argument that his wife. had put forth in a hopeless battle against the car's purchase suddenly recurred.

"You might injure somebody," she had flashed out, in futile triumph. "And you know what that means. Damages and lawsuits and everything. You remember how much it cost Carrington when he ran down that old woman at Market and Third Streets.' "Carrington was a fool!" Findlay had snapped back. 'Any man with sense who runs a car takes out a liability insurance policy."

It was curious, he reflected, that these ideas of lawsuits and damages and lack of insurance had not occurred to him at the precise moment of the accident. If they had he would have been able to put his finger on the impulse that had urged flight. No, he had been moved by no mercenary impulse, he thanked Heaven, as he clambered out of the car and drew off his gloves. But he admitted that there was added reason for secrecy. Of course, he had not been in the least responsible for the accident, but courts and juries were notoriously unfriendly to defendants who owned cars and winged the common people with their driving. Besides, his wife did not know that her husband had neglected the safeguard of insurance. might not be compelled to pay damages, but he might be called upon to defend a suit, and he did not relish the idea of admitting to his wife his penny-wise and pound-foolish economy. Somehow the legal possibilities back of the situation reduced the circumstance to an impersonal, documentary affair. The mishap seemed suddenly shorn of its primitiveness, its headlong terror, its tragic intensity. He stopped thinking of the accident in terms of passionate feeling.

He

"Well, if worst comes to worst," he

Peter Findlay did not bother to take his keys from his pocket as he climbed up to the front door. He was quite sure that his wife's eagerness would catch the first sound of footfalls, and he looked forward to a suddenly opened door and a cry of relieved delight. But the expected did not happen. Even his fumbling at the lock brought no evidence of any stirring within. Newspaper and bread lay where they had been unceremoniously dropped upon the door-mat, and a bottle of milk stood in a corner just under the electric pushbutton. He picked up these three evidences of morning somnolence and gently closed the door. The house was silent.... Could it be possible that his wife had slept on through the night undisturbed by his curious absence? Or had she dropped off into an exhausted doze with the coming of daybreak? He set the bottle of milk and the bread and the tightly twisted newspaper upon a chair near the hat-rack and went up the thickly carpeted stairs to the second floor.

Long before he reached the landing he saw that the front bedroom door was open. This was unusual; he quickened his steps. He tramped heavily past the bathroom and came to the second surprise of the morning. His wife was not in their bedroom; indeed, the bed was not even rumpled. Peter Findlay was puzzled.

He crossed over to the massive marble-topped bureau and instinctively began to brush his hair. He was not exactly troubled, but he was unmistakably nonplussed. Then suddenly the truth dawned upon him. Gertrude had been lonely and unnerved and she had decided to snuggle in with one of the children.

The children occupied the two small sleeping-rooms at the back of the house. Dick, the boy, had the smaller room of the two, having chivalrously yielded the larger room to his sister when she had become old enough for the distinction of her own little corner in the Findlay household.

Having freshened up with a dash of

cold water upon his face, Peter Findlay tiptoed to these two bedrooms to confirm his hopes. There was not a soul in either place.

He went down-stairs, peering into the parlor, into the shaded dining-room, into the immaculate kitchen. A loaf of bread lay half cut upon the table, on the gas-range three saucepans testified to preparations for a meal, an abandoned apron clung limply to a chair. Findlay lifted the saucepan lids. Potatoes covered with water lay in one, carrots and string-beans filled the other two. He leaned back against the kitchen table, folding his arms. What did it all mean?

Gertrude and the two children gone! And they had left hurriedly, too, in the midst of preparations for the evening meal. Could it be possible that their going was connected in some vague way with the accident of yesterday? The thought flashed through Findlay's mind with the briefest of flights. The accident of yesterday! For the moment he had almost forgotten about it.

He roused himself from inactivity and went over the house again, peering into every room with a vague, futile hope that he would find them crouched in some corner in an endeavor to tease him into anxiety. When he finally decided that they were not to be found he sat down upon the stairs, resting his chin in an upturned hand. The fact that Gertrude and the two children were not at home was in itself not so disturbing; he could think of a dozen reasons for their being away. But he could not fathom the apparent unpreparedness of their departure. Something urgent must have pulled Gertrude so suddenly away from her household tasks. In the midst of cutting a loaf of bread she had been called to some stirring duty. But why the children? There were a half-dozen neighbors who would have been delighted to drop over and stay all night with the children. Then why-why

He rose to his feet with a gesture of confused irritation.

Why the children? He kept repeating this phrase over and over again as he stood with one hand upon the newelpost, the other thrust deeply into his pocket. Why the children, unless

Was it possible that little Grace No, accidents rarely happened to girls-they were too cautious. But how about Dick? Suppose that Dick- Boys were notoriously careless, and, what was worse, even daring. Take the boy yesterday, for instance. It was ridiculous to think that any boy could have been so reckless! Fancy running head-on into a leisurely driven car! There was the slightest reason for it. Of course, nothing of the kind had happened to Dick, yet he would give him a serious. talking to later in the day. He didn't want his boy brought home dead or mangled. That was the worst of raising a family. Always the anxiety that perhaps

not

And suddenly Peter Findlay thought for the first time of the father and mother of the boy that he had killed yesterday. Death was instantaneous!

The memory of the trite newspaper statement fell like a blow upon him; he sat down again. He tried to picture the situation reversed-his boy shattered and abandoned, brought home dead in the arms of some kindly stranger. Why hadn't he thought of this before? What was there about instinctive, primitive self-preservation that swamped so utterly all the finer impulses? Yesterday he had thought only of flight, cowardly, headlong flight. In the fraction. of a second all the safeguards of acquired social obligation had been swept awayPeter Findlay might have been a stark and conscienceless savage, fleeing from the wrath of a rival tribe bent on a lustful revenge, for all the reasoning that lay back of his performance. But he had a feeling that the sway of reason. in such matters was not the ultimate test of fineness. Did there not exist in men the instinctive impulse for generous action, the fine upstanding quality of gallantry, the will to be courageous, without calculation or according to formula and rule? Yes, there were such men, Peter Findlay told himself, but he did not belong in their ranks. Even if reason had urged him to turn back after the first mad impulse, he would have been no less the craven. Indeed, he would have been a despicable compromiser, a man returning in the guise of charity to do the service that a sense

of sheer expediency had forced upon him. It did not matter, in the final analysis, whether he had been snared by either the loaded or the empty pistol of Fate; the realization that the pistol had been empty, that his surrender had been futile and uncalled for, added to the irony, but it did not change the values.

This dead boy had parents-a father and a mother, a man and a woman, no doubt, very much in the circumstances of him and Gertrude. The father was away at his business at the time of the accident, the mother, of course, at home -at home getting the dinner, preparing her evening meal. He thought of Gertrude, on that very night, cutting the loaf of bread. He reconstructed the picture; there was something symbolic and fine about this maternal figure bending slightly over the homely, humdrum task. Then suddenly some startling word had come. He saw the harried face of the woman, the quick whipping off of her apron, the hasty preparations for departure. But it was the whippingoff of the kitchen apron that stood so clearly forth as a symbol of motherly alarm. How many times in his life had this quick shedding of the badge of housewifely service been the sure forerunner of disaster! How many times had he not seen his own mother answer the call to stirring service by the simple flinging aside of her blue gingham apron! And yet, not until now had the full force of so homely an act borne down on him. In thousands of homes at that moment as many aprons were being tossed aside to meet supreme tests. And upon the paved streets of the city ruthless chance waited patiently an opportunity to try out the souls of the unsuspecting. Peter Findlay had been standing upon the mountain-top of his egotism, straining toward a far horizon for the heroic things.of life; and all this time the big issues were crouching close at hand, planning to spring at the throat of his self-esteem.

He went back into the kitchen. Yes, this kitchen might have been the very kitchen of the mother whom he, Peter Findlay, had robbed of her child. The carefully covered saucepans waiting for the lighted gas-flame, the half-cut loaf

upon the white table-top, the apron clinging limply to a chair-here were mute evidences of the ordinary channels of life dammed up by relentless cir

cumstance.

He picked up the apron and held it at arm's-length. It seemed incredible that a blue gingham apron could be the symbol of anything dramatic in life. Peter Findlay let the apron slip from his fingers to the floor and covered his eyes. For in that moment he was blinded by a sudden realization. What if this apron did belong to the mother he had robbed? He stood in the center of the deserted kitchen clenching his hands, not daring to open his eyes to the truth. Yesterday he had killed a boy. Anybody's boy? Somebody's boy? His boy? Had he killed his boy yesterday and ridden on, leaving tender services to strangers? Oh no, of course it had not been Dick! It couldn't have been Dick! What did the newspaper report say? Surely there had been a name given. There must have been a name given. But he had been too interested in the phrase "Death was instantaneous," to pay any attention to less stirring details. Then he remembered. There had been no name. An unknown boy! That was what the newspaper had said-an unknown boy.

There was a horrible fascination about the idea it knit the tragedy so closely together. Like a story-it was like a story. He repeated this phrase over and over. He tried to rally from the

shock of his fears. He tried to tell himself that it was all incredible, preposterous, too precisely arranged to be real. But slowly, hopelessly, he succumbed to the inevitable. His boy was dead, killed by his own hand; but the tragedy lay deeper than the mere fact of death. If he had only come to this terrible trick of Fate with clean hands! If he had turned back! What answer could he make to Gertrude at that moment when she discovered that her husband had ridden away and left their child dead in the gutter? For that moment would come, he told himself. There was no shadow in the whole world that could hide the truth from the searching gaze of a mother's vindictive grief.

"But I didn't know it was our child!"

Aloud he rehearsed this cry of justification. But his words condemned him utterly. Already he felt himself shriveling before her accusing finger, withered utterly by her scorn.

He dragged up the stairs to his bedroom and flung himself prone upon the bed.

Peter Findlay lay for some time in a stupor of retrospection. With his face buried in a pillow and the yellow light of morning shut out completely, this daze was succeeded by distempered sleep. It was the sound of his own thick breathing that finally awakened him. He got up at once. The sun was beating into the front windows; the room was stifling. He did not have to grope for the key to his predicament; even while he slept realization had gripped him hard. But already reaction was setting in, and instinctively he began to think again in terms of custom and routine. It was nine o'clock, time to go down to the office. He wondered what he had better do. How was he to locate Gertrude? Would it be best to make inquiries about the neighborhood or endure the strain a little longer and await the natural developments? Should he go to the office or stay at home? At which place would Gertrude be likely to look for him? This boy that had been killed Findlay stopped short, arrested by the fact that for the moment he had not identified this boy as his son. An unknown boy! He took courage. The accident had happened at five o'clock. Gertrude had left in the midst of preparations for dinner. If the boy was unknown to the ferrets of the daily press, how was it possible for Gertrude to be called away so promptly? It was not possible! Peter Findlay raised the window and let in the air. And as he did so he laughed. In an instant the main thread of a distempered fancy had answered the sharp pull of reason, and his elaborate pattern of fears was unraveled, destroyed. He had no cause for dismay. His wife had left for some good and sufficient reason that had no connection with the tragedy of yesterday. If he looked carefully he would no doubt find a note telling why she had gone. He felt, suddenly, a great