Come home--come home--"
He remembered when he had first heard this song in a play called 'Ten
Nights in a Bar-room', many years before, and how it had wrenched his
heart and soul, and covered him with a sudden cloud of shame and anger.
For his father had been a drunkard, and his brother had grown up a
drunkard, that brother whom he had not seen for ten years until--until--
He shuddered, closed his eyes, as though to shut out something that the
mind saw. He had had a rough life, he had become inured to the seamy side
of things--there was a seamy side even in this clean, free, wide land;
and he had no sentimentality; though something seemed to hurt and shame
him now.
"As soon as your day's work was done.
Come home--come home--"
The crowd was uproarious. The exhilaration had become a kind of delirium.
Men were losing their heads; there was an element of irresponsibility in
the new outbreak likely to breed some violent act, which every man of
them would lament when sober again.
Nettlewood Foyle watched the dust rising from the wheels of the stage,
which had passed the elevator and was nearing the Prairie Home Hotel far
down the street. He would soon leave behind him this noisy ribaldry of
which he was the centre.
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