CHILDREN OF THE WHIRLWIND

by Leroy Scott




CHAPTER I


It was an uninspiring bit of street: narrow, paved with cobble; hot
and noisy in summer, reeking with unwholesome mud during the drizzling
and snow-slimed months of winter. It looked anything this May after
noon except a starting-place for drama. But, then, the great dramas of
life often avoid the splendid estates and trappings with which
conventional romance would equip them, and have their beginnings in
unlikeliest environment; and thence sweep on to a noble, consuming
tragedy, or to a glorious unfolding of souls. Life is a composite of
contradictions--a puzzle to the wisest of us: the lily lifting its
graceful purity aloft may have its roots in a dunghill. Samson's dead
lion putrefying by a roadside is ever and again being found to be a
storehouse of wild honey. We are too accustomed to the ordinary and
the obvious to consider that beauty or worth may, after bitter
travail, grow out of that which is ugly and unpromising.

Thus no one who looked on Maggie Carlisle and Larry Brainard at their
beginnings, had even a guess what manner of persons were to develop
from them or what their stories were to be.

The houses on the bit of street were all three-storied and all of a