s broken in as I am. There's a joy in
getting one's work behind one that the luxury of idleness does not
know."

"All the same I wish you'd stop awhile." Then she gave him one of her
long, thoughtful looks and spoke with the beautiful, vibrant note in her
voice which he had called its "Creole quality." "We have been such old,
such close, such dear friends," she went on, "that I wonder if I may
tell you how profoundly--how sincerely--"

She faltered and he took up her unfinished sentence with the instinct to
put her embarrassment at ease. "I knew it all along, God bless you," he
said. "One feels such things, I think."

"One ought to," she responded.

"It's been hard," he pursued frankly; and she was struck by the utter
absence of picturesqueness, of the whining tone of the victim in his
treatment of the situation. There was no appeal to her sympathy in his
manner, and he impressed her suddenly as a man who had come into
possession of a power over the results of events if not over the passage
of events themselves. "It's been harder, perhaps, than I can say--poor
girl," he added quickly.

With a start she sat erect in her chair. "And you can stop to think of
her?" she demanded.

The hand lying on the arm of his chair closed and unclosed itself
slowly, without effort. "Can't you?" he asked abruptly.

"Not sincerely, not naturally," she answered. "I think of you."

She saw a spasm of pain pass suddenly into his face, a too ardent
leaping, as it were, of the blood.

"You would understand things better," he said presently, after a pause
in which she felt that she had witnessed a quick, sharp struggle, "if
you had ever watched the slow moral poisoning of cocaine--or had ever
been," he added with a harsh, grating sound in his usually quiet voice,
"at the mercy of such a damned brute as Brady."

His sudden rage shook her like a strong wind, and she liked him the
better for his relapse into an elemental passion in the cause of
righteousness.

"I'm glad you cursed him," she remarked simply. "I like it!"

He smiled a little grimly. "So do I."

"And yet how terrible it is," she said, with an effort to work herself
into a sentiment of pity for Connie which she did not feel. "It makes
the whole world look full of horror."

"Well, it's a comfort to think I never argued that it wasn't a hard
road," he returned, with the whimsical humour which seemed only to
deepen her sense of tragedy. "I've merely maintained that the o