e the month is up?"

"You certainly will," Mr. Beldeman replied. "If you should want me
before--an advance payment or anything of that sort--I am at the Royal
Hotel."

Maraton was alone in the room. For some moments he remained motionless.
He heard Aaron and Julia in the hall but he did not hasten to join them.
He moved instead to the window and stood watching Beldeman's retreating
form.

CHAPTER XX

Maraton led the way on to the roof of one of London's newer hotels.

"They won't give us dinner here," he explained. "London isn't civilised
enough for that yet, or perhaps it's a matter of climate. But we can
get all sorts of things to eat, and some wine, and sit and watch the
lights come out. I was here the other night alone and I thought it the
most restful spot in London."

He called a waiter and had a table drawn up to the palisaded edge of the
roof. Then he slipped something into the man's hand, and there seemed
to be no difficulty about serving them with anything they required.

"A salad, some sandwiches, a bottle of hock and plenty of strawberries.
We shan't starve, at any rate," Maraton declared. "Lean back in your
chairs, you children of the city, lean down and look at your mother.
Look at her smoke-hung arms, stretched out as though to gather in the
universe; and the lights upon her bosom--see how they come twinkling
into existence."

Both of them followed his outstretched finger with their eyes, but Julia
only shivered.

"I hate it," she muttered, "hate it all! London seems to me like a
great, rapacious monster. Our bodies and souls are sacrificed over
there. For what? I was in Piccadilly and the parks to-day. Is there
any justice in the world, I wonder? It's just as though there were a
kink in the great wheels and they weren't running true."

"Sometimes I think," Maraton declared, "that the matter would right
itself automatically but for the interference of weak people. The laws
of life are tampered with so often by people without understanding.
They keep alive the unworthy. They try to make life easier for the
unfit. They endow hospitals and build model dwellings. It's a sop to
their consciences. It's like planting a flower on the grave of the man
you have murdered."

"But these things help," Aaron protested.

"Help? They retard," Maraton insisted. "All charity is the most
vicious form of self-indulgence. Can't you see that if the poor died in
the street and the sick were left to crawl abou