ny times her feet carried her into strange streets among strange
people, where the reek of shipping became incense to her nostrils, and
hairy-chested men of many ports stared boldly into her face and,
reading her aright, made room with deference.

Upon an evening just before the annual surcease of frivolity, Gregory
St. Ledger called at the Manton home and, finding Ethel alone in the
library, asked her to be his wife.

Because it was an evening of her blackest mood she neither refused nor
accepted him, but put him off for a year on the ground that she did not
know her mind.

In vain he protested, arguing the power and prestige of the St. Ledger
millions, and in the end departed to seek out an acquaintance who had
to do with a blatant Sunday newspaper.

During the interview that followed, in the course of which the reporter
ordered and St. Ledger paid for many tall drinks of intricate
concoction, the gilded youth made no statement of fact, but the
impression he managed to convey furnished the theme for the news story
whose headlines seared into Bill Carmody's soul to the crashing of his
tenets and gods.

In the library the girl sat far into the night and thought of the man
who had won her heart and of the toy man who would buy her hand.

CHAPTER XXVII

JEANNE

Bill Carmody opened his eyes. A weird darkness surrounded him through
which dancing half-lights played upon a close-thrown screen. Dully he
watched the grotesque flickering of lights and shadows. He was not
surprised--not even curious. Nothing mattered--nothing save the
terrible pain in his head and the racking ache of the muscles of his
body. His skin felt hot and drawn and he gasped for air. A great weight
seemed pressing upon him, and when he tried to fill his bursting lungs
instead of great drafts of cooling air, hot, stabbing pains shot
through his chest and he groaned aloud at the hurt of it.

He turned his aching body, wincing at the movement, and stared dully
through a low aperture in the encircling screen. Beyond, in another
world, it seemed, a tiny fire flickered under a suspended iron kettle.

Near the fire a blanketed form sat motionless with knees tight-hugged
against shrunken breast. Upon the blanket-covered knees rested the
angular chin of a dark-skinned, leathern face, upon which the firelight
played fitfully, and beneath a tangled mop of graying hair two eyes
flashed and dulled like black opals.

He glanced upward and realized