had ever let live, he was the meanest. The girl came along in the
usual hurried, anxious fashion. And when she saw the empty window he
thought for a minute she was going to sink right down there on the
sidewalk. Everything about her seemed to give way--as if something
from which she had been drawing had been taken from her. The
luminousness gone from her face, there were cruel revelations.
"Blast my _soul!_" the old man muttered angrily, not far from
tearfully. She looked up and down the noisy, dirty, parched street,
then back to the empty window. For a minute she just stood
there--that was the worst minute of all. And then--accepting--she
turned and walked slowly away, walked as the too-weary and the
too-often disappointed walk.

It was with not wholly steady hand that the old man hastened to
replace the picture, all the while telling himself what he thought
of himself: more low-down than the cat who plays with the mouse,
meaner than the man who'd take the bone from the dog, less to be
loved than the man who would kick over the child's play-house, only
to be compared with the brute who would snatch the cup of water from
the dying--such were the verdicts he pronounced. He thought perhaps
she would come back, and stayed there until almost seven, waiting
for her, though pretending it was necessary that he take down and
then put up again the front curtains. All the next day he was
restless and irritable. As if to make up to the girl for the
contemptible trick he had played he spent a whole hour that
afternoon arranging a tapestry background for the picture. "She'll
think," he told himself, "that this was why it was out, and won't be
worried about its being gone again. This will just be a little sign
to her that it's here to stay."