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“Go out of my office, MacDowell,” said John Jackson suddenly. “I’m tired.”

MacDowell scrutinized him severely.

“What’s come over you today?”

Jackson closed his eyes.

“I don’t want to argue,” he said after awhile.

MacDowell slapped his fat upper leg and got to his feet.

“This is a funny attitude from you,” he remarked. “You better think it over.”

“Good-bye.”

Perceiving, to his astonishment, that John Jackson meant what he said, MacDowell took his monstrous body to the door.

“Well, well,” he said, turning and shaking his finger at Jackson as if he were a bad boy, “who’d have thought it from you after all?”

When he had gone Jackson rang again for his clerk.

“I’m going away,” he remarked casually. “I may be gone for some time—perhaps a week, perhaps longer. I want you to cancel every engagement I have and pay off my servants at home and close up my house.”

Mr. Fowler could hardly believe his ears.

“Close up your house?”

Jackson nodded.

“But why—why is it?” demanded Fowler in amazement.

Jackson looked out the high window upon the grey little city drenched now by slanting, slapping rain—his city, he had felt sometimes, in those rare moments when life had lent him time to be happy. That flash of green trees running up the main boulevard—he had made that possible, and Children’s Park, and the white dripping buildings around Courthouse Square over the way.