Nearly every great fact is like a well-balanced kite; it has for its
tail a whimsy. Haggerty, on a certain day, received twenty-five
hundred dollars from the Hindu prince and five hundred more from the
hotel management. The detective bore up under the strain with stoic
complacency. "The Blind Madonna of the Pagan--Chance" always had her
hand upon his shoulder.
Kitty went to Bar Harbor, her mother to visit friends in Orange.
Thomas walked with a straight spine always; but it stiffened to think
that, without knowing a solitary item about his past, they trusted him
with the run of the house. The first day there was work to do; the
second day, a little less; the third, nothing at all. So he moped
about the great house, lonesome as a forgotten dog. He wrote a sonnet
on being lonesome, tore it up and flung the scraps into the
waste-basket. Once, he seated himself at the piano and picked out with
clumsy forefinger _Walking Down the Old Kent Road_. Kitty could play.
Often in the mornings, while at his desk, he had heard her; and oddly
enough, he seemed to sense her moods by what she played.
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