eminded him, from time to time, and with
ever-increasing anxiety, of their ever-melting letter of credit. But,
on the other hand, she stood ready to sacrifice everything, in order to
build some new wall of interest about him, that she might immure him
from his past. She still planned and schemed to shield him, not so
much from the world, as from himself. Yet he had seen, almost from the
first, that their pursuit of contentment was born of their common and
ever-increasing terror of the future. Each left unuttered the actual
emptiness and desolation of life, yet each nursed the bitter sting of
it. Day by day he had put on a bold face, because he had long since
learned how poignantly miserable his own misery could make her. And,
above all things, he hated to see her unhappy.

CHAPTER IV

THE WIDENING ROAD

Under the softly-waving palms of that midnight garden, Durkin relived
their feverish past, month by remembered month, until they found the
need of money staring them in the face. He reviewed each increasing
dilemma, until, eventually, he had left her in her squalid Paris
pension with her music pupils and the last eighty francs, while he
clutched at the passing straw of an exporting house clerkship in
Marseilles. The exporting house, which was under American guidance,
had flickered and gone out ignominiously, and week by desperate week
each new promise of honest work seemed to wither into a chimera at his
feverish touch. He had been told of a demand for electrical experts at
Tangier, and had promptly worked his passage to that outlandish
sea-port on a Belgian coasting-steamer, only to find a week's
employment installing a burglar-alarm system in the ware-house of a
Liverpool shipping company. In Gibraltar, a week or two longer, he had
been able to supply his immediate wants through assisting in the
reconstruction of a moving-picture machine, untimely wrecked on the
outskirts of Fez by Moorish fanatics who had believed it to be the
invention of the Evil One.

It was at Gibraltar, too, that his first mocking hopes for some renewal
of life had come to him, along with the vague hint that his
transmitting camera had at last been recognized, and perhaps even
marketed. But escape from that little seaport had been as difficult as
escape from gaol. He had finally effected a hazardous and
ever-memorable migration from Algeciras to Cimiez, but only by acting
as chauffeur for a help-abandoned, gout-ridden, and