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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
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