sinking into a chair and covering her face with her hands. Then seized with a convulsive sobbing, she cried, "No, no, it is too cruel. I won't do it, I won't, I can't!"

"Come, don't be a fool," he said angrily, taking her by the shoulder.

"Seven years, seven years!" she cried hysterically. "What good will it do me then, what do I care for money then! Oh, my youth, my youth! And this is the end of it. I knew it, I knew it! Fargus, you were not human! Fargus, you did this to punish me!"

All at once she rose, shaken and frantic as a prophetess, and seizing her hair in her hands cried:

"Oh, those years, I see them, those seven terrible years!"

She began to wander about the room avoiding the lawyer, invoking always the youth which she seemed to see expiring before her, in the inexorable limits of nature.

Bofinger, after a vain attempt to check her, remained helpless in the presence of such hysteria. A moment later he stole from the room, took his satchel and went to the door. There he stopped, waited, saw her convulsed with sobbing, frowned, raised his shoulders and slipped out.

On the sidewalk the gods of suspicion, which ruled him, made him cry suddenly:

"Hell! I am a fool to be so tender-hearted. She's been lyin' to me to hide some mystery. That was the time to put the screws on!"

He hesitated, scanning the shade. From time to time a silhouette passed, frantic and suffering. This shadow, without life or body, representing nothing but an agony, horrified him. He turned and hastened away.

CHAPTER III THE FIRM OF GROLL AND BOFINGER

Six months previous to the events of the last chapter, four men were awaiting the opening of the afternoon session of the police court, in an office whose glass front displayed to the travel of Tenth Street the legend,

Hyman Groll & Alonzo Bofinger

Counselors-at-Law.

Opposite, the Jefferson Market Court loomed from the triangular island which is formed by the junction of Sixth and Greenwich Avenues, whose muddy torrents descend, roaring, to shake it from its foundation.

The court is one of seven similar mouths, down which one may look aghast, into the cauldron at the depths of society. Vice nowhere has a more horrid aspect, for nowhere is it more mean and repulsive with the inequalities of suffering. Journalism, to strip the novice of all his illusions, sends him to this rude school, where he shortly learns not only that evil as well as good is inevitable and eternal, but that justice, in common with eternity, must be accepted in faith, for to explore its depths is to recoil in horror. To him, who knows the misery which bears the weight of the social superstructure, justice has the aspect of a seal over a living tomb, and the present building is a mockery. Where there should stand a waste of gray is a meaningless mass of red brick. In place of a stern, ponderous block of granite, unsoftened by ledge or cornice, crude with the crudity of man's justice to man, there rises in architectural legerdemain a jumble of turret and tower, as though variety and gaiety could be sought in this saddest and dreariest of the manifestations of society.

Confronting the barred windows of the prison annex, from Sixth to Seventh Avenues, runs a short row of clingy, undersized houses, given over to the lawyers of the army of "Shysters," who, much as a ragpicker rakes a garbage heap, scrape from the petty crimes of the court a miserable income. The lawyer who succeeds has his runners whipping up the gutters and the alleys, his alliances suspected or open with the criminal and the police, while the miserable fee which results from this elaborate system must often be divided into three parts.

The city, which does nothing in character and wantonly mingles loveliness and evil, the ridiculous and the tragic, has not marked the spot for avoidance but has forced the lawyers to dispute their foothold with half a dozen small shops. The marketers, who come to the grocery, basket on arm, share the sidewalk with the prostitute and the dive-keeper. At four o'clock each afternoon the street is momentarily flushed by the influx of children from a neighboring school, who also witness the reluctant entrances into these mysterious offices, where despair dominates beyond what the court itself can inflict.

In this row, the offices of Groll & Bofinger were the most pretentious and immaculate. The glass front sparkled. The gilt announcement arrested the eye afar, while a green shade, raised half-way from the bottom, effectually screened the occupants and suggested a little of the mystery of the pawn-shop, which offers obscurity to the despair of its clients. An office boy, prematurely gone into long trousers, lolled in the doorway, finishing by means of a hat pin the butt of a cigar and searching the passers-by with something of the restlessness of the pointer, alert to flush a new client.

Within the office the dwarfed ceiling and the frown of the opposite prison left a dim area by the window and sunk the rest into shadow. In the rear two dull glass doors threw a foggy interruption which filled with foreboding the imagination of the client who entered these confidential cabinets. Otherwise, the office was matter-of-fact and characterless; where one expected dust, confusion, and slouch, everything was clean, ordered and new, seeking an atmosphere of respectable mediocrity. This decent surface, nevertheless, after the first introduction never failed to impress the initiated with the treachery of an ambuscade.

By the window Bofinger, with a leg over the table, was chatting with a reporter, Joseph LeBeau, who from nervousness was perched on the back of a chair, feet on the seat, gulping down frankfurter sandwiches from a paper bag. On the bench near by his comrade Ganzler, from a news agency, was stretched on his fat back, a law book under his shaved head, hat over his eyes, pretending to snatch the sleep he had squandered during the night. In the rear the figure of Groll, withdrawn from the conversation, presented nothing but an indistinct bulk.

Ganzler was one of those rats of journalism which are as necessary to the press as the criminal confederate to the police, a bohemian to whom reporting was a destiny rather than a profession. He touched all men on the worst side, knew blackmailer and sharper by name, enjoyed their company and fell into their ways, did them favors when they turned up in the Police Court, was their intermediary with the force and, in return, ran without fear streets where a detective would not venture alone. He knew each subtle channel of graft about the court and won the confidence of all by dipping into the same ugly mess. He was coarse, acute, with a memory which never let slip a fact, made of iron, tricky, but too immersed in the life he reported to lend to the bare facts that inspiration which needs a far perspective. He was rated sure and indispensable. In journalism that is at once a guarantee and an epitaph.

Joseph LeBeau had not been in the service long enough to disguise either his curiosity or his horror. He was a blonde young man remarkable for that height of forehead which the image of Walter Scott has impressed upon the memory, and which, while invariably betokening great imagination and intellectuality, appears alike in poets and casuists. In the brown eyes were perception and wit fed by an