scrutinizing the stranger with military care, added: "I should
like to thrash you within an inch of your life. If you weren't drunk I
would. If you are a gentleman and have a card I want you to give it to
me. I want to talk to you later." He leaned over and presented a cold,
hard face to that of Mr. Beales Chadsey, of Louisville, Kentucky.

"Tha's all right, Captain," leered Chadsey, mockingly. "I got a card.
No harm done. Here you are. You c'n see me any time you want--Hotel
Buckingham, Fifth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. I got a right to speak
to anybody I please, where I please, when I please. See?"

He fumbled and protested while the officer stood by read to take him in
charge. Not finding a card, he added: "Tha's all right. Write it down.
Beales Chadsey, Hotel Buckingham, or Louisville, Kentucky. See me any
time you want to. Tha's Hattie Starr. She knows me. I couldn't make
a mistake about her--not once in a million. Many's the night I spent
in her house."

Braxmar was quite ready to lunge at him had not the officer intervened.

Back in the dining-room Berenice and her mother were sitting, the
latter quite flustered, pale, distrait, horribly taken aback--by far
too much distressed for any convincing measure of deception.

"Why, the very idea!" she was saying. "That dreadful man! How
terrible! I never saw him before in my life."

Berenice, disturbed and nonplussed, was thinking of the familiar and
lecherous leer with which the stranger had addressed her mother--the
horror, the shame of it. Could even a drunken man, if utterly
mistaken, be so defiant, so persistent, so willing to explain? What
shameful things had she been hearing?

"Come, mother," she said, gently, and with dignity; "never mind, it is
all right. We can go home at once. You will feel better when you are
out of here."

She called a waiter and asked him to say to the gentlemen that they had
gone to the women's dressing-room. She pushed an intervening chair out
of the way and gave her mother her arm.

"To think I should be so insulted," Mrs. Carter mumbled on, "here in a
great hotel, in the presence of Lieutenant Braxmar and Mr. Cowperwood!
This is too dreadful. Well, I never."

She half whimpered as she walked; and Berenice, surveying the room with
dignity, a lofty superiority in her face, led solemnly forth, a
strange, lacerating pain about her heart. What was at the bottom of
these shameful statements? Why should this dru