perfume of her hair. His hands shook.

With Holt he saw their hosts to their motor.

"Aren't you coming home with us for supper?" asked Mrs. Newberry.

But Holt, who was abominably curious, wished to quiz Stainton, and Stainton, with the wisdom of his years, knew that enough had been done for an initial evening.

"No, thanks," Stainton allowed Holt to say; "we've just met after five years, you know, and we've got no end of things to talk about."

Ethel Newberry leaned forward and pressed Stainton's hand.

"You will look us up soon?" she politely enquired.

"Indeed, yes," said Stainton.

"Always glad to see you," said Newberry.

Muriel said nothing, but Stainton pressed warmly the little hand that she unreservedly offered.

"Good-night," said Stainton.

"Good-night," said Muriel.

No, thought Stainton, as he reluctantly turned away with Holt, in spite of her caustic reference to his age, she must be merely an impulsive, innocent girl. He was glad to come to this determination, glad, however, simply because it was what he concluded must be a final answer to a question that had already become annoying.

III

EN GARDE, MONSIEUR!

As the motor swerved away from them, making for the up-channel of Broadway, Holt seized Stainton's arm, and began to pilot him through the crowd.

"Now," said he, "will you please tell me what the——"

"No," said Stainton, "I won't. Not yet."

"But you promised——"

"I know that. Only wait until we get to a quieter place than this. You can scarcely expect me to call out such things for all New York to hear."

They freed themselves of the whirlpool around the opera-house and began to walk northward.

Stainton was looking about him with the eyes of a man that has been for years in prison and has but just returned to his native town. He was not a New Yorker by birth, and he had never known the city well, but he had always loved it and through all his western exile he had dreamed of this triumphal return. He soon seemed to have forgotten the puzzle that he had agreed to explain to his friend.

"It's the same," he said, his gaze darting about the scurrying street, pausing now and again to rest on this or that building new to him although already old to Broadway. "It's still the same, and yet it's new—all new.—What's that place, the one over there on the corner?"

Holt grudgingly told him.

"Fresh?" asked Stainton.

"Five years old," said Holt.

"And that?—And that?"

Again Holt supplied the information thus requested.

"I think that New York is alive," said Stainton.

"Well, you never thought it was Philadelphia, did you?"

"I mean that the city itself is a living thing, a gigantic organism. You know they say a man changes, atom by atom, so that, every seven years, he is a fresh being, and yet remains the same being. I believe that is true of some cities and most of all of New York."

Holt slapped him on the back.

"Good old Jim!" said Holt.

The careless words turned Stainton to matters more personal.

"Confound it," he said, only half-good-naturedly, "I wish you wouldn't call me old. I'm not."

"Of course," said Holt, "not old. Did I say old? Why, you're younger than ever, and a grand slam younger than I'll ever be again."

Stainton regarded this man of thirty-odd with whom, for a short time, he had been once so fast a friend and whom New York had so speedily converted into a corpulent, smug, bald-headed dandy. It would, indeed, be a pity if Stainton at fifty were not younger than Holt at thirty-five. And yet Holt had referred to the prematurely withered Newberry as "Old Newberry" much as he had now spoken of the miner as "Old Stainton"!

"Oh, you," said Stainton: "you have reached the age at which a man doesn't object to being called old."

The cheerful Holt snorted. "All right," he said. "Now we're just off the Lobster Coast. Let's look about for a harbour and a likely place to eat and hear the sad story of your life."

They found it, although it is always a difficult task for a New Yorker to decide which of a hundred anxious restaurants he will at any given time pay to poison him; and, while Stainton's eyes went wide with wonder at the place, Holt, amid the muddy mill-race of his customary talk where bobbed only an occasional chip of clean English, piloted the way into the selected eating and drinking place. It was one of those gilded khans, each more gilded than the last, which, in the neighbourhood of Broadway and Forty-Second Street, spring up like grass beside a country road, last about as long as the grass, and, once gone, are about as long remembered. Here, at a corner table, Holt, within a few minutes, was drinking rapid glasses of Irish whiskey and soda, while Stainton slowly sipped at a glass filled from a half-bottle of champagne.

"Now, then," said Holt: "your story. For Heaven's sake have pity on a suffering fellow-creature!"

Stainton considered.

"Of course," he said, "this is confidential."

"Of course."

"I shouldn't tell it, George, if it weren't that I had betrayed part of it in a moment of excitement——"

"Excitement? Well, I suppose that's what some call it."

"And so," pursued Stainton, "made such an ass of myself——"

"Now you're getting down to facts," Holt agreed.

"In the first place," said Stainton, "I repeat that I am not crazy."

"Then I am," said Holt with conviction.

"You are the best judge of that, George."

Holt smiled.

"Wait a bit," said Stainton. "I wouldn't be surprised, George, if you were a trifle mad; as for me, just make up your mind that J. G. Stainton is sane."

"That's what they all say," Holt interposed. "Bellevue's full of men that are sane. Still, anything to get on with your story: sane you are."

"No, you mustn't grant it that way. I want you to draw your conclusions from what I am going to tell you."

Holt groaned.

"All right; all right," he said, "but for Heaven's sake tell it!"

Stainton settled himself in his chair. He lit a cigar.

"I have to begin," he said, "at the beginning. The average man's biography is the story of an internecine war, a war between his heart and his head, and the heart generally wins. What has won with me, you may, as I said, judge for yourself. My father was a doctor in one of those little towns that are scattered about Boston in the way that the smaller drops of ink are scattered about the big splash on a blotter. My mother died when I was born. The governor didn't have a big practice, but it was a steady one, and, if he was the sort that would never be rich, at least he promised to be the sort that would never starve. What he mostly wanted was to send me to Harvard, and then to make a surgeon of me."

"I knew you must have had a good coach in bandaging," said Holt.

Stainton disregarded this reference to the grizzly.

"I could never make out," he resumed, "why so many parents think they have a right to determine their children's tastes and trades. That tendency is one of our several modern forms of slavery. Most men seem to assume that Fate, by making them fathers through no will of their own, has played them a low trick, and that they are therefore right in revenging themselves on Fate by training their sons into being exactly the sort of men that they themselves have been, so that Fate will thus be forced, you see, to do the same thing all over again."

"I