As the sound of the furious voice stopped short, there fell a stricken silence upon these three men.
Old Carson Tinker's gaze drifted downward from his employer's face. He sat, then, gazing into the rosy1 little fire until something upon the lapel of his coat caught his attention—a wilted2 and disreputable carnation3. He threw it into the fire; and, with a sombre satisfaction, watched it sizzle. This brief pleasure ended, he became expressionless and relapsed into complete mummification.
Potter cleared his throat several times, and as many times seemed about to speak, and did not; but finally, hearing a murmur4 from the old man gazing at the fire, he requested to be informed of its nature.
“What?” Tinker asked, feebly.
“I said: 'What are you mumbling5 about?'”
“Nothing.”
“What was it you said?”
“I said it was the bride-look,” said the old man gently. “That's what it was about her—the bride-look.”
“The bride-look!”
It was a word that went deep into the mourning heart of the playwright6. “The bride-look!” That was it: the bride's happiness!
“She had more than that,” said Potter peevishly7, but, if the others had noticed it his voice shook. “She could act! And I don't know how the devil to get along without that hypocrite. Just like her to marry the first regular man that asked her!”
Then young Stewart Canby had a vision of a room in a boarding-house far over in Brooklyn, and of two poor, brave young people there, and of a loss more actual than his own—a vision of a hard-working, careworn8, stalwart Packer trying to comfort a weeping little bride who ha............