n that crime-reeked, sordid room at the Roost--where
Pale Face Harry, gaunt, emaciated, coughed, and, trembling, plunged a
morphine needle in his arm; where the Flopper, a wretched tatterdemalion
from the gutter, licked greedy lips and gloated in his rascality; where
Helena, flushed-faced, inhaled her interminable cigarettes and dangled
her legs from the table edge; where Madison, suave, flippant, so certain
of his own infallibility, glorying in his crooked masterpiece, laid the
tribute to genius at his own feet!

Strange scene! Strange antithesis indeed! It was quiet here--very
still--only the distant, muffled boom of the pounding surf. And the
shrine-room, for the first time since its creation, was locked against
the night. It lay now in shadow from the single lamp upon the table--and
the light, where it fell in a shortened circle, for the lamp itself had
a little green paper shade, was soft, subdued and mellow.

Where he had been wont to sit in the days gone by, the Patriarch sat now
in his armchair by the empty fireplace--in the shadow--his head turned
in his strange, listening, attentive way toward the table--toward the
four who were grouped around it. There had been no one to stay with him
in his own room, and so Helena had brought him there--to play his silent
part.

At the table, Pale Face Harry, bronzed and rugged, clear-eyed, a robust
figure from his clean living, his months of the out-of-doors, traced the
grain of the wood on the table mechanically with his finger nail, his
face sober, perplexed; while the Flopper, clear-eyed too, his face
almost a handsome one in its bright alertness, now that it had rounded
out and the hard, premature lines were gone, mirrored Pale Face Harry's
perturbed expression, his eyes fixed anxiously on Madison opposite him;
and Helena, sitting beside Madison, was very quiet, her forehead
wrinkled and pursed up into little furrows, the brown eyes with a hint
of dismay and consternation lurking in their depths, one hand stretched
out to lay quite unconsciously on Madison's sleeve--and from the sleeve
to steal occasionally into Madison's hand.

Madison, his lips tight, pushed back his chair suddenly--they had been
sitting there an hour.

"You were right, Helena," he said, with a nervous laugh. "The more you
try to figure it out the worse it gets."

"Aw, say, Doc," pleaded the Flopper desperately, "don't youse give it
up--youse have got de head--youse ain't never left us in a hole