t was probably
unconscious of itself.

The light from above his head slanted more and more toward the east.

Once he arose and lighted a pipe. He returned to the easel and stood
staring with his hands in his pockets. He moved like one in a sleep.
Suddenly the gleam shot into his eyes again. He dropped to the stool and
grabbed a brush. At the end of a certain long, tumultuous period he
clinched his pipe more firmly in his teeth and puffed strongly. The
thought might have occurred to him that it was not alight, for he looked
at it with a vague, questioning glance. There came another knock at the
door. "Go to the devil!" he shouted, without turning his head.

Hollanden crossed the corridor then to the den.

"Hi, there, Hollie! Hello, boy! Just the fellow we want to see. Come
in--sit down--hit a pipe. Say, who was the girl Billie Hawker went mad
over this summer?"

"Blazes!" said Hollanden, recovering slowly from this onslaught.
"Who--what--how did you Indians find it out?"

"Oh, we tumbled!" they cried in delight, "we tumbled."

"There!" said Hollanden, reproaching himself. "And I thought you were
such a lot of blockheads."

"Oh, we tumbled!" they cried again in their ecstasy. "But who is she?
That's the point."

"Well, she was a girl."

"Yes, go on."

"A New York girl."

"Yes."

"A perfectly stunning New York girl."

"Yes. Go ahead."

"A perfectly stunning New York girl of a very wealthy and rather
old-fashioned family."

"Well, I'll be shot! You don't mean it! She is practically seated on top
of the Matterhorn. Poor old Billie!"

"Not at all," said Hollanden composedly.

It was a common habit of Purple Sanderson to call attention at night to
the resemblance of the den to some little ward in a hospital. Upon this
night, when Sanderson and Grief were buried in slumber, Pennoyer moved
restlessly. "Wrink!" he called softly into the darkness in the direction
of the divan which was secretly a coal-box.

"What?" said Wrinkles in a surly voice. His mind had evidently been
caught at the threshold of sleep.

"Do you think Florinda cares much for Billie Hawker?"

Wrinkles fretted through some oaths. "How in thunder do I know?" The
divan creaked as he turned his face to the wall.

"Well----" muttered Pennoyer.

CHAPTER XXVI.

The harmony of summer sunlight on leaf and blade of green was not known
to the two windows, which looked forth at an obviously endless building
of brownstone about whic