rd had lost its sunburned character and grown
jet black, his face, and particularly his hands, were pale to
transparence, his eyes burned too brightly in their sunken sockets. He
was not even a ghost of his former self, but rather a sinister
reincarnation. He felt that he was even more forbidding than on that
night when he had sent Brauer shivering from his presence. He doubted
whether Brauer would recognize him again, so subtle and marked was the
change. He hardly recognized himself, and the transformation was not
solely a matter of physical degeneration. No, there was something
indefinable in the quality of his decline.

He fluttered about the town, at first aimlessly, like a defenseless
fledgling thrust before its time from the nest. He was weak and
tremulous and utterly miserable. Yet he felt compelled to go forward.
He must escape from Storch! _He must_!

The docks, usually full of bustle, were silent and almost deserted.
Fred questioned a man loafing upon a pile of lumber. It appeared that
a strike of stevedores was the cause of this outward sign of
inactivity. Boats were being loaded quietly, but the process was
furtive and sullen. Occasionally, out of the wide expanse of brooding
indolence a knot of men would gather flockwise, and melt as quickly.
There was an ominous quality in the swiftness with which these
cloudlike groups congealed and disintegrated. The sinister blight of
repression was over everything--repressed desires, repressed joys,
repressed hatreds. It was almost as sad as the noonday silence of
Fairview.

Fred slunk along in deep dejection. He wanted the color and life and
bustle of accomplishment. A slight activity before one of the docks
beguiled him from his depression. A passenger steamer was preparing
for its appointed flight south and a knot of blue-coated policemen
maintained a safe path from curb to dock entrance. Here was a touch of
liveliness and gayety--the released laughter of people bent on a
holiday, hopeful farewells called out heartily, taxicabs dashing up
with exaggerated haste. He was warming himself at the flame of this
genial pageant, when an opulent machine came rolling up to the curb. A
sudden surge of arrivals had pressed into service every available
porter, and the alighting occupants, a man and a woman, stood waiting
for some one to help them with their luggage. Fred stared with
impersonal curiosity. Then, as instinctively, he fell back. The man
was Axel Hilmer and the w