hen they chose. The
puerile restraint annoyed him; his implied inability to master himself
humiliated him, the more so because, secretly, he was horribly afraid in
the remote depths of his heart.

Exactly how it happened he did not remember, except that he had gone
down town on business and had lunched with several men. There was
claret. Later he remembered another cafe, farther up town, and another,
more brilliantly lighted. After that there were vague hours--the fierce
fever of debauch wrapping night and day in flame through which he moved,
unseeing, unheeding, deafened, drenched soul and body in the living
fire; or dreaming, feeling the subsiding fury of desire pulse and ebb
and flow, rocking him to unconsciousness.

His father's old servants had found him again, this time in the area;
and this time the same ankle, not yet strong, had been broken.

Through the waning winter days, as he lay brooding in bitterness,
realising that it was all to do over again, Plank's shy visits became
gradually part of the routine. But it was many days before Siward
perceived in the big, lumbering, pink-fisted man anything to attract
him beyond the faintly amused curiosity of one man for another who is in
process of establishing himself as the first of a race.

As for reciprocation in other forms except the most superficial, or of
permitting a personal note to sound ever so discreetly, Siward
tolerated no such idea. Even the tentative advances of Plank hinting
on willingness, and perhaps ability, to help Siward in the Amalgamated
tangle were pleasantly ignored. Unpaid services rendered by men like
Plank were impossible; any obligation to Plank was utterly out of the
question. Meanwhile they began to like one another--at least Siward
often found himself looking forward with pleasure to a visit from
Plank. There had never been any question of the latter's attitude toward
Siward.

Plank began to frequent the house, but never informally. It is doubtful
whether he could have practised informality in that house even at
Siward's invitation. Something of the attitude of a college lower
classman for a man in a class above seemed to typify their relations;
and that feeling is never entirely eradicated between men, no matter how
close their relationship in after-life.

One very bad night Plank came to the house and was admitted by
Gumble. Wands, the second man, stood behind the aged butler; both were
apparently frightened.

That something