offered him in a Western volunteer regiment operating on the Island of
Leyte, completed the rupture.

* * * * *

And now he was back again, a chance career ended, with option of picking
up the severed threads--his inheritance at the loom--and of retying
them, warp and weft, and continuing the pattern according to the designs
of the tufted, tinted pile-yarn, knotted in by his ancestors before him.

There was nothing else to do; so he did it. Civil and certain social
obligations were mechanically reassumed; he appeared in his sister's pew
for worship, he reënrolled in his clubs as a resident member once more;
the directors of such charities as he meddled with he notified of his
return; he remitted his dues to the various museums and municipal or
private organisations which had always expected support from his
family; he subscribed to the _Sun_.

He was more conservative, however, in mending the purely social strands
so long relaxed or severed. The various registers and blue-books
recorded his residence under "dilatory domiciles"; he did not subscribe
to the opera, preferring to chance it in case harmony-hunger attacked
him; pre-Yuletide functions he dodged, considering that his sister's
days in January and attendance at other family formalities were
sufficient.

Meanwhile he was looking for two things--an apartment and a job--the
first energetically combated by his immediate family.

It was rather odd--the scarcity of jobs. Of course Austin offered him