Thus Lanyard became once more possessor of a tolerably comprehensive
wardrobe.
But, those trunks released more than his personal belongings; intermingled
were possessions that had been his wife's and his boy's. As he unpacked,
memories peopled those perfunctorily luxurious lodgings of the transient
with melancholy ghosts as sweet and sad as lavender and rue.
For hours on end the man sat idle, head bowed down, hands plucking
aimlessly at small broidered garments.
And if in the sweep and turmoil of late events he seemed to have forgotten
for a little that feud which had brought him overseas, he roused from this
brief interlude of saddened dreaming with the iron of deadly purpose newly
entered into his soul, and in his heart one dominant thought, that now his
hour with Ekstrom could not, must not, be long deferred.
In the street there rose an uproar of inhuman bawling. Lanyard went to the
private door, hailed one of the husky authors of the din, an itinerant
news-vendor, and disbursed a nickel coin for one cent's worth of spushul
uxtry and four cents' worth of howling impudence.
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