day; alone, that raucous noise marred the calm.

She peered idly through the leaves. A half a dozen women, their white
dresses making them visible in the dusk, a few men whose forms loomed
indistinctly against the edge of the sky, noised past her and were
gone down the road. One couple, she perceived, lingered behind. They
had reached the shade of the bay tree, were so close that she might
have reached out and touched them, before she realized the situation.
She was about to call out, to cough, when the man spoke.

"No, I won't hurt you," he said, "I'm as gentle a little kisser as you
ever saw." The voice was that of Bert Chester.

"Aw, you're too fresh," came the voice of the girl. But as they drew
into deeper shadow, she was not pulling away from him.

"Fresh as a daisy!" said the voice of Bertram Chester. Followed a
struggle, a faint "stop, stop!" in the voice of the girl, the sound of
gross and heavy kissing. In a moment, the white form of the girl broke
down the road, the greater, darker form of the man lumbering after. He
caught her, held her for a longer time and a lesser struggle. She came
out of this one laughing, and down the road they went, his arm a black
shadow about her waist.

Eleanor's deeper and higher self--the self that lay like a filmy,
impalpable wrapper about her conscious mind, so that at times she
appeared to herself as two persons--that consciousness stood aloof in
expectation of disgust, revulsion, horror. It came as a confused
surprise that she felt nothing of the kind. A cloying sweetness, a
sensation purely physical, as though a syrup had been poured into all
the channels of her nerves, began in her throat, rushed through body
and limbs. The sweet tide surged backward, beat in a wave of faintness
upon her heart. Shame, like air into a vacuum, followed with a rush.
She sank to the ground, clinging to the bench.

When she had so far mastered herself that she could feel her own
senses, she was praying aloud--praying in the rite which held her
emotions while it failed with her reason.

"Ave Maria Sanctissima!" she was saying over and over again.

CHAPTER V

"Match you to see whether it's good, old fifteen cent feed at the
Marseillaise or a four bit bust at the Nevada," said Bertram Chester.

"I'll take you," responded Mark Heath, flipping a silver dollar as he
spoke. "Heads the Nevada; tails the croutons and Dago red."

"Tails it is--aw, let's make it the Nevada to show the