her, "I was
not always so unfortunate, nor am I responsible for my adversities.
Could you--"

With a shudder of disgust Marcia quickened her pace, and the man,
fearful of the eye of police authority, dropped back. But Miss Terroll
could never bring herself without a struggle to ignore the plea of old
age. It struck her, too, that despite his panhandler's manner this man
was yet in a fashion different.

There was evidently someone who sought to keep him neatly mended up,
for her woman's eye had caught that detail in a glance. Through his
inebriety lurked a ghost-like suggestion of past gentility. She turned
impulsively back, beckoning to him as she searched her purse. In it were
two quarters and one of them she gave him.

"God bless you, madam," he began with a grotesque echo of the ancient
pompousness. "God knows I had never anticipated such a necessity."

As she hurried on, he removed his hat and bowed with an attempt at
stateliness which held a pathos of burlesque.

Marcia Terroll was spared the hurt of knowing that the panhandler with
whom she had divided the contents of her pocketbook, and whom she had
thus enabled to buy five greatly desired glasses of beer, was the father
of the man she loved.

So, though Mary Burton did not know it, this was the way old Tom eked
out the very scant pin-money she could spare him for his own method of
drugging his sorrows.

CHAPTER XXXII

An old year was dying and a young year was about to be born. Along the
blazing stretch of Broadway from Thirtieth street to Columbus circle
seethed and sounded the noisy saturnalia of New Year's Eve.

The street that never sleeps was tonight a human spill-way, churning in
freshet. Between its walls went up the clamor of human throats raised in
talk, in shouts, in song, in laughter and in contest with the blaring of
toy horns, the racket of rattlers and all those discordances that seek
to swell pandemonium to the bursting of ear-drums. Theaters were
disgorging their "big-night" audiences and pedestrians moved in a
congested mass which battalions of traffic officers herded slowly as
dogs herd crowded sheep.

An endless procession was this, in which human entities were molecules,
that crept, elbowing, jamming, laughing along. Holly-wreathed windows
bore, in additional decoration, placards announcing, "This cafe is open
all night." For this was the city's wild occasion of suspended laws,
when two edicts only hold in the favored po