hey heard only the bell, which rang on and on
and on.

CHAPTER TWO

THE PRICE OF FOLLY

John North occupied the front rooms on the first floor of the
three-story brick structure that stood at the corner of Main Street and
the Square. The only other tenant on the floor with him was Andy
Gilmore, who had apartments at the back of the building. Until quite
recently Mr. North and Mr. Gilmore had been friends and boon companions,
but of late North had rather avoided this neighbor of his.

Mount Hope said that North had parted with the major portion of his
small fortune to Gilmore. Mount Hope also said and believed, and with
most excellent justification for so doing, that North was a fool--a
truth he had told himself so many times within the last month that it
had become the utter weariness of iteration.

He was a muscular young fellow of twenty-six, with a handsome face, and,
when he chose, a kindly charming manner. He had been--and he was fully
aware of this--as idle and as worthless as any young fellow could
possibly be; he was even aware that the worst Mount Hope said of him was
much better than he deserved. In those hours that were such a new
experience to him, when he denied himself other companionship than his
own accusing conscience; when the contemplation of the naked shape of
his folly absorbed him to the exclusion of all else, he would sit before
his fire with the poker clutched in his hands and his elbows resting on
his knees, poking between the bars of the grate, poking moodily, while
under his breath he cursed the weakness that had made him what he was.

With his hair in disorder on his handsome shapely head, he would sit
thus hours together, not wholly insensible to a certain grim sense of
humor, since in all his schemes of life he had made no provision for the
very thing that had happened. He wondered mightily what a fellow could
do with his last thousand dollars, especially when a fellow chanced to
be in love and meditated nothing less than marriage; for North's
day-dream, coming like the sun through a rift in the clouds to light up
the somberness of his solitary musings, was all of love and Elizabeth
Herbert. He wondered what she had heard of him--little that was good, he
told himself, and probably much that was to his discredit. Yet as he sat
there he was slowly shaping plans for the future. One point was clear:
he must leave Mount Hope, where he had run his course, where he was
involved and