?... But we can't be too careful.... At _Treasure
Island Inn_?"

"Yes, and where--_you_ couldn't call!"

"But I shall know where you are."

Bedient returned to his rooms, and Miss Mallory resumed her walk.... An
hour and a half later, Bedient walked out of the big gate of _The
Pleiad_, and down to the city.... For the first time in several days,
Celestino Rey breathed long. Assassination was only one of the things
he had feared....

Forty-eight unavailing hours passed in _Treasure Island Inn_. This
night would bring an end to the mysterious four days. Bedient was at
bay before the remnant of what had been and hoped. To his own eyes, he
was an abject failure now, even in these physical affairs--he who had
dared to arraign New York workers in almost every aspect of their life!
The last beacon of his spirit was blown out in the storm; his mind had
long since preyed upon itself, the pith gone from it, through drifting
in dark dream-tides; and now he who had been trained from a boy to
physical actions weakly succumbed before the old Spaniard's will and
strategy. Yet he could not find it within him greatly to care.

_Treasure Island Inn_ had interested him at first, not so much through
its exterior contrast to _The Pleiad_ (which was complete enough for
any city to furnish), but because its wretchedness in the sense of
money-lack was less than in its moral poverty. Its evils were so open
and self-reviling; its passages so angular, so suggestive of
blood-drip and brooding horror; its rooms so peeled, meagre and
creaking--depravity so sincere. Crime certainly had not been spared
around the world to furnish its living actors for _Treasure Island
Inn_. All the ragtag was there--not a lust nor a mannerism missing.

And now that life had cast him into this place, Bedient found himself
utterly unable to contend with the squalor of fact and mind; indeed, he
was quite as ineffectual as he had been in the midst of the glittering
deviltry of _The Pleiad_.... Abased before realities; lost to the
meaning of every excellence of his life-training; shattered by psychic
revolts; his brain reflecting the strange mirages and singing the vague
nothings of starvation--but enumeration only dulls the picture! In
every plane of his nature, he was close to the end, forty-eight hours
after his arrival at the Inn of the lower city.

Certain things had become mature, irrevocable: That he was a
superfluous type in this Western world of his birth;