And then there were quick steps in the corridor, a hand at the door- k.n.o.b, a slim, tall figure in the doorway. Emma McChesney seemed to waft across the rooms and into the embrace of the slim, tall figure.

"Welcome--home!" she cried. "Sketch in the furniture to suit yourself."

"This is going to be great--great!" announced Jock. "What do you know about the Oriental potentate down-stairs! I guess Otis Skinner has nothing on him when it comes--Why, h.e.l.lo, Mr. Buck!" He was peering into the next room. "Why don't you folks light up? I thought you were another agent person. Met that one down in the hail. Said he'd be right up. What's the matter with him anyway? He smiles like a waxworks. When the elevator took me up he was still smiling from the foyer, and I could see his grin after the rest of him was lost to sight. Regular Cheshire. What's this? Droring-room?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'Welcome home!' she cried. 'Sketch in the furniture to suit yourself'"]

He rattled on like a pleased boy. He strode over to shake hands with Buck. Emma McChesney, cheeks glowing, eyed him adoringly. Then she gave a little suppressed cry.

"Jock, what's happened?"

Jock whirled around like a cat. "Where? When? What?"

Emma McChesney pointed at him with one shaking finger. "You! You're thin! You're--you're emaciated. Your shoulders, where are they? Your-- your legs--"

Jock looked down at himself. His glance was pride. "Clothes," he said.

"Clothes?" faltered his mother.

"You're losing your punch, Mother? You used to be up on men's rigging.

All the boys look like their own shadows these days. English cut. No padding. No heels. Incurve at the waist. Watch me walk." He flapped across the room, chest concave, shoulders rounded, arms hanging limp, feet wide apart, chin thrust forward.

"Do you mean to tell me that's your present form of locomotion?"

demanded his mother.

"I hope so. Been practising it for weeks. They call it the juvenile jump, and all our best leading men have it. I trailed Douglas Fairbanks for days before I really got it."

And the tension between T. A. Buck and Emma McChesney snapped with a jerk, and they both laughed, and laughed again, at Jock's air of offended dignity. They laughed until the rancor in the heart of the man and the hurt and pity in the heart of the woman melted into a bond of lasting understanding.

"Go on--laugh!" said Jock. "Say, Mother, is there a shower in the bathroom, h'm?" And was off to investigate.

The laughter trailed away into nothingness. "Jock," called his mother, "do you want your bedroom done in plain or stripes?"

"Plain," came from the regions beyond. "Got a lot of pennants and everything."

T. A. Buck picked up his stick from the corner in which it stood.

"I'll run along," he said. "You two will want to talk things over together." He raised his voice to reach the boy in the other room.

"I'm off, Jock."

Jock's protest sounded down the hall. "Don't leave me alone with her.

She'll blarney me into consenting to blue-and-pink rosebud paper in my bedroom."

T. A. Buck had the courage to smile even at that. Emma McChesney was watching him, her clear eyes troubled, anxious.

At the door Buck turned, came back a step or two. "I--I think, if you don't mind, I'll play hooky this time and run over to Atlantic City for a couple of days. You'll find things slowing up, now that the holidays are so near."

"Fine idea--fine!" agreed Emma McChesney; but her eyes still wore the troubled look.

"Good-by," said T. A. Buck abruptly.

"Good--" and then she stopped. "I've a brand-new idea. Give you something to worry about on your vacation."

"I'm supplied," answered T. A. Buck grimly.

"Nonsense! A real worry. A business worry. A surprise."

Jock had joined them, and was towering over his mother, her hand in his.

T. A. Buck regarded them moodily. "After your pajama and knickerbocker stunt I'm braced for anything."

"Nothing theatrical this time," she a.s.sured him. "Don't expect a show such as you got when I touched off the last fuse."

An eager, expectant look was replacing the gloom that bad clouded his face. "Spring it."

Emma McChesney waited a moment; then, "I think the time has come to put in another line--a staple. It's--flannel nightgowns."

"Flannel nightgowns!" Disgust shivered through Buck's voice. "_Flannel nightgowns!_ They quit wearing those when Broadway was a cow-path."

"Did, eh?" retorted Emma McChesney. "That's the New-Yorker speaking.

Just because the French near-actresses at the Winter Garden wear silk lace and sea-foam nighties in their imported boudoir skits, and just because they display only those frilly, beribboned handmade affairs in the Fifth Avenue shop-windows, don't you ever think that they're a national vice. Let me tell you," she went on as T. A. Buck's demeanor grew more bristlingly antagonistic, "there are thousands and thousands of women up in Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and Michigan, and Oregon, and Alaska, and Nebraska, and Dakota who are thankful to retire every night protected by one long, thick, serviceable flannel nightie, and one practical hot-water bag. Up in those countries retiring isn't a social rite: it's a feat of hardihood. I'm keen for a line of plain, full, roomy old-fashioned flannel nightgowns of the improved T. A.

Buck Featherloom products variety. They'll be wearing 'em long after knickerbockers have been cut up for patchwork."

The moody look was quite absent from T. A. Buck's face now, and the troubled look from Emma McChesney's eyes.

"Well," Buck said grudgingly, "if you were to advise making up a line of the latest models in deep-sea divers' uniforms, I suppose I'd give in. But flannel nightgowns! In the twentieth century--flannel night--"

"Think it over," laughed Emma McChesney as he opened the door. "We'll have it out, tooth and nail, when you get back."

The door closed upon him. Emma McChesney and her son were left alone in their new home to be.

"Turn out the light, son," said Emma McChesney, "and come to the window. There's a view! Worth the money, alone."

Jock switched off the light. "D' you know, Blonde, I shouldn't wonder if old T. A.'s sweetish on you," he said as he came over to the window.

"Old!"

"He's forty or over, isn't he?"

"Son, do you realize your charming mother's thirty-nine?"

"Oh, you! That's different. You look a kid. You're young in all the spots where other women of thirty-nine look old. Around the eyes, and under the chin, and your hands, and the corners of your mouth."

In the twilight Emma McChesney turned to stare at her son. "Just where did you learn all that, young 'un? At college?"

And, "Some view, isn't it, Mother?" parried Jock. The two stood there, side by side, looking out across the great city that glittered and swam in the soft haze of the late November afternoon. There are lovelier sights than New York seen at night, from a window eyrie with a mauve haze softening all, as a beautiful but experienced woman is softened by an artfully draped scarf of chiffon. There are cities of roses, cities of mountains, cities of palm-trees and sparkling lakes; but no sight, be it of mountains, or roses, or lakes, or waving palm- trees, is more likely to cause that vague something which catches you in the throat.

It caught those two home-hungry people. And it opened the lips of one of them almost against his will.