so confident about the outcome of his invention; he had known a
man at home who went in for that sort of thing--had fitted up the
lights for his own country house on the Sound; but he himself had never
dreamed such a thing as a transmitting camera, that could telegraph a
picture all the way from Gibraltar to New York, for instance, was even
a possibility! . . . The Department, by the way, was going to have a
cruiser drop in at Mogador, to look into the looting of the Methodist
Missionary stores at Fruga. There was a remote chance that this
cruiser might call at the Rock, on the homeward journey. But it was
problematical. . . . And that had been the end of it all, the
ignominious end. And still again the despairing Durkin was being
confronted and challenged and mocked by this call to him from half way
round the world. It maddened and sickened him, the very thought of his
helplessness, so Aeschylean in its torturing complications, so ironic
in its refinement of cruelty. It stung him into a spirit of blind
revolt. It was unfair, too utterly unfair, he told himself, as he
paced the faded carpet of his cheap hotel-room, and the mild Riviera
sunlight crept in through the window-square and the serenely soft and
alluring sea-air drifted in between the open shutters.

It meant that a new and purposeful path had been blazed through the
tangled complexities of life for him, yet he could make no move to take
advantage of it. It meant that the door of his delivery had been swung
wide, with its mockery of open and honest sunlight, and yet his feet
were to remain fettered in that underworld gloom he had grown to hate.
He must still stay an unwilling prisoner in this garden of studied
indolence, this playground of invalids and gamblers; he must still
dawdle idly about these glittering, stagnating squares, fringing a
crowd of meaningless foreigners, skulking half-fed and poorly housed
about this opulent showplace of the world that set its appeasing
theatricalities into motion only at the touch of ready gold.

Durkin remembered, at that moment, that he was woefully hungry. He
also remembered, more gratefully, that the young Chicagoan, the lonely
and loquacious youth he had met the day before in the _cafe_ of the
"_Terrasse_," had asked him to take dinner with him, to view the
splendor of "_Ciro's_" and a keeper of the _vestiaire_ in scarlet
breeches and silk stockings. Afterwards they were to go to the little
bon-bon play-hou