t up in silence.

They heard the clatter of the horses' hoofs on the wet asphalt, the
sharp closing of the cab door, the rattle of the wheel-tires across the
steel car-tracks, and he was gone. A moment later they were dipping up
the avenue between two long rows of undulating lights, with the rain
drifting in on their faces.

Then Keenan turned and looked down at the woman beside him. During
several minutes of unbroken silence Frank nursed the dim consciousness
of his keen and scrutinizing glance. But her mind seemed encaged in a
body that was already dead; she had neither the will nor the power to
look up at him.

Then, with no warning word or gesture, he stooped down and kissed her
on her heavy red mouth.

At any other time, she knew, she would have fought against that
tainting touch; every drop of red blood in her body would have risen to
combat it. But now she neither repulsed it nor responded to it. She
seemed submerged and smothered in a tide of terrible indifference. She
even found herself weighing the meaning of that affront to all that was
not ignoble in her.

She even caught at it, with an inward gasp of enlightenment. It meant
more than she had at first seen. It brought a new scene to the
shifting drama; it meant a new turn to the hurrying game. It meant
that if she only waited, and could be wise and wary and calculating,
she still might hug to her breast some tattered hope for the impending
end.

She knew that Keenan was still watching her; she knew that he was, in
some manner, being torn between contending feelings, that some
obliterating impulse was falling between him and that grim concert of
forces of which he was a member. It was the shadow of passion falling
across the paths of duty--it was the play and the problem as old as the
world.

And what was she, then? That was the question she asked herself, with
a little sobbing gasp--what was she, trading thus, even in thought, on
her bruised and wearied body? What had she fallen to, what was it that
had deadened all that was softer and better and purer within her, that
she could thus see slip away from her the last solace and dignity of
her womanhood?

There, she told herself bitterly, lay the degradation and the ultimate
danger of the life she had led. It was there that the grimmer tragedy
came into her career. The surrender of ever greater and greater
hostages to expediency, the retreat to ever meaner and meaner
instruments of act