strode
along, his straight, trim bulk, his keen, judicial profile--a profile
that spoke strong of the best traditions of American blood--marking
him for what he was among a crowd not to be matched, in its way, upon
the Western Continent.

At the second slanting of the great, tawdry lane he bent with it and
encountered suddenly a little knot of flustered women just descended
from the elevated way that doubled the din and blare of the shrieking
city. They were bundle-filled, voluble, dressed by any standards save
those of their native city, far beyond their probable means and
undoubted station. As they stopped unexpectedly and hesitated, damming
the flood of hurrying citizens, Roger halted of necessity and stepped
backward, but in avoiding them he bumped heavily against the person
behind him. A startled gasp, something soft against his shoulder, the
sharp edge of a projecting hat, told him that this person was a
woman, and stepping sidewise into the shelter of a neighbouring
news-stall, he raised his hat with a courtesy alien to the place and
hour.

"I beg your pardon, madam," he said, "I trust I have not hurt you?"

"No," said the woman, who wore a heavy grey veil, and as that is
literally all she said and as her method of saying it was as
convincing as it was simple, one would suppose the incident closed and
look to see Roger complete his journey to his club without further
adventure.

Do I wish he had? God knows. It was undoubtedly the turning-point in
his life and he was forty. Had he gone on to the club where I was
waiting for him; had we dined, played out our rubber, dropped in at
the occasional chamber concert that was our usual and almost our only
dissipation in those days, I should not now be ransacking old letters
and diaries from which to make this book, nor would Margarita's
picture--her loveliest, as _Juliet_--lean toward me from the wall. She
is smiling; not as one smiles in photographs, but as a flesh-and-blood
woman droops over the man she loves and smiles her heart into his
lips, reaching over his shoulder. Everything slips behind but you two,
herself and you, when you look at it. Sarony, who took it, told me he
had never posed such a subject, and I believe him.

Well, well, it's done now. It was twenty years ago that Roger bumped
into his fate in that eddy of Broadway and I was as powerless as you
are now to disentangle him and keep him for myself, which, selfishly
enough, of course, I wanted ter