ter a few moments, that the couple seated
diagonally across from him with their backs to the crowd, were not the
least interesting pair in the room. The man was drunk. He wore a
dinner coat with a dishevelled tie and shirt swollen by spillings of
water and wine. His eyes, dim and blood-shot, roved unnaturally from
side to side. His breath came short between his lips.

"He's been on a spree!" thought Rose.

The woman was almost if not quite sober. She was pretty, with dark
eyes and feverish high color, and she kept her active eyes fixed on
her companion with the alertness of a hawk. From time to time she
would lean and whisper intently to him, and he would answer by
inclining his head heavily or by a particularly ghoulish and repellent
wink.

Rose scrutinized them dumbly for some minutes until the woman gave him
a quick, resentful look; then he shifted his gaze to two of the most
conspicuously hilarious of the promenaders who were on a protracted
circuit of the tables. To his surprise he recognized in one of them
the young man by whom he had been so ludicrously entertained at
Delmonico's. This started him thinking of Key with a vague
sentimentality, not unmixed with awe. Key was dead. He had fallen
thirty-five feet and split his skull like a cracked cocoa-nut.

"He was a darn good guy," thought Rose mournfully. "He was a darn good
guy, o'right. That was awful hard luck about him."

The two promenaders approached and started down between Rose's table
and the next, addressing friends and strangers alike with jovial
familiarity. Suddenly Rose saw the fair-haired one with the prominent
teeth stop, look unsteadily at the man and girl opposite, and then
begin to move his head disapprovingly from side to side.

The man with the blood-shot eyes looked up.

"Gordy," said the promenader with the prominent teeth, "Gordy."

"Hello," said the man with the stained shirt thickly.

Prominent teeth shook his finger pessimistically at the pair, giving
the woman a glance of aloof condemnation.

"What'd I tell you Gordy?"

Gordon stirred in his seat.

"Go to hell!" he said.

Dean continued to stand there shaking his finger. The woman began to
get angry.

"You go way!" she cried fiercely. "You're drunk, that's what you are!"

"So's he," suggested Dean, staying the motion of his finger and
pointing it at Gordon.

Peter Himmel ambled up, owlish now and oratorically inclined.

"Here now," he began as if called upon to deal