It was a
chance, and yet, what a strange chance! It troubled and upset him. His
black, round-featured face took on deep wrinkles of perplexity. The
"misery" which had hung darkly on his horizon for weeks engulfed him
without warning. But in the very bitterness of his melancholy he knew
at last his disease. It was not champagne or recreation that he
needed, not even a "po'k-chop," although his desire for it had been a
symptom, a groping for a too homeopathic remedy: he was homesick.
Easy, childish tears came into his eyes, and ran over his shining
cheeks. He shivered forlornly with a sudden sense of cold, and
absently clutched at the lapels of his gorgeous, fur-lined ulster.
Then in abrupt reaction he laughed aloud, so that the shrill, musical
falsetto startled the passers-by, and in another moment a little
semicircle of the curious watched spellbound as a black man,
exquisitely appareled, danced in wild, loose grace before the dull
background of a somewhat grimy and apparently vacant window. A newsboy
recognized him.
He heard his name being passed from mouth to mouth, and came partly to
his senses.
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