off in the
muddled crowd. Axia and Amory, acquaintances of an hour, jostled behind
a waiter to a table at a point of vantage; there they took seats and
watched.

"There's Findle Margotson, from New Haven!" she cried above the uproar.
"'Lo, Findle! Whoo-ee!"

"Oh, Axia!" he shouted in salutation. "C'mon over to our table." "No!"
Amory whispered.

"Can't do it, Findle; I'm with somebody else! Call me up to-morrow about
one o'clock!"

Findle, a nondescript man-about-Bisty's, answered incoherently and
turned back to the brilliant blonde whom he was endeavoring to steer
around the room.

"There's a natural damn fool," commented Amory.

"Oh, he's all right. Here's the old jitney waiter. If you ask me, I want
a double Daiquiri."

"Make it four."

The crowd whirled and changed and shifted. They were mostly from the
colleges, with a scattering of the male refuse of Broadway, and women of
two types, the higher of which was the chorus girl. On the whole it was
a typical crowd, and their party as typical as any. About three-fourths
of the whole business was for effect and therefore harmless, ended at
the door of the cafe, soon enough for the five-o'clock train back to
Yale or Princeton; about one-fourth continued on into the dimmer hours
and gathered strange dust from strange places. Their party was scheduled
to be one of the harmless kind. Fred Sloane and Phoebe Column were old
friends; Axia and Amory new ones. But strange things are prepared even
in the dead of night, and the unusual, which lurks least in the cafe,
home of the prosaic and inevitable, was preparing to spoil for him
the waning romance of Broadway. The way it took was so inexpressibly
terrible, so unbelievable, that afterward he never thought of it as
experience; but it was a scene from a misty tragedy, played far behind
the veil, and that it meant something definite he knew.

About one o'clock they moved to Maxim's, and two found them in
Deviniere's. Sloane had been drinking consecutively and was in a state
of unsteady exhilaration, but Amory was quite tiresomely sober; they
had run across none of those ancient, corrupt buyers of champagne who
usually assisted their New York parties. They were just through dancing
and were making their way back to their chairs when Amory became aware
that some one at a near-by table was looking at him. He turned and
glanced casually... a middle-aged man dressed in a brown sack suit, it
was, sitting a little apart at a