ve them and force their grudging recognition!"

"I understand now," Disston said slowly. "But, Kate, is it worth the
price you'll pay for it?"

"I'm used to paying well for everything, whether it's success or
experience," she replied bitterly. "As I feel now, it's worth the
sacrifice demanded, and I'm willing to make it."

"It's like seeing a great musician concentrate his energies upon the
banjo--he may dignify the instrument, but he belittles himself in doing
it. Kate," he pleaded, "don't throw away any years of happiness! Don't
hurt your own character for a handful of nonentities whose importance
you exaggerate! I'm right, believe me."

"I am as I am, and I have to learn all my lessons by experience."

"It may be too late when you've learned this one," he said sadly.

"Too late!" She shivered. A specter rose before her that she had seen
before--hard-featured, domineering, unloved, unloving, chafing in
ghastly solitude, alone with her sheep and her money, and the best years
of her life behind her. She saw herself as her work and her thoughts
would make her. For an instant she wavered. If Disston had known, he
might have swayed her then, but, since he could not, he only said with
an effort:

"If your love for me isn't big enough to make you abandon this purpose,
I shan't urge you. I know it would be useless. You have a strange
nature, Kate--a mixture of steel and velvet, of wormwood and honey."

Absorbed in the swiftly moving panorama that was passing before her, she
scarcely heard him. She was gazing at a bizarre figure in a wreath of
paper roses trip down a staircase, radiant and eager--to be greeted by
mocking eyes and unsuppressed titters; at a crowded courtroom, staring
mercilessly, tense, with unfriendly curiosity; at Neifkins with his
insolent stare, his skin, red, shiny, stretched to cracking across his
broad, square-jawed face; at Wentz, listening in cold amusement to a
frightened, tremulous voice pleading for leniency; at a sallow face with
dead brown eyes leering through a cloud of smoke, suggesting in
contemptuous familiarity, "Why don't you fade away--open a dance hall in
some live burg and get a liquor license?"; at Mrs. Toomey, pinched with
worry and malnutrition, a look of craven cowardice in her blue eyes,
blurting out in the candor of desperation, "Your friendship might hurt
us in our business!"

She saw it all--figures and episodes passed in review before her, even
to irrelevant details, an