hrank from it, extinguished it. And for a
long time he sat there in the darkness of early morning, his unfilled
pipe clutched in his nerveless hand.

CHAPTER II

A DREAM ENDS

To pick up once more and tighten and knot together the loosened threads
which represented the unfinished record that his race had woven into the
social fabric of the metropolis was merely an automatic matter for
Selwyn.

His own people had always been among the makers of that fabric. Into
part of its vast and intricate pattern they had woven an inconspicuously
honourable record--chronicles of births and deaths and marriages, a
plain memorandum of plain living, and upright dealing with their fellow
men.

Some public service of modest nature they had performed, not seeking it,
not shirking; accomplishing it cleanly when it was intrusted to them.

His forefathers had been, as a rule, professional men--physicians and
lawyers; his grandfather died under the walls of Chapultepec Castle
while twisting a tourniquet for a cursing dragoon; an uncle remained
indefinitely at Malvern Hill; an only brother at Montauk Point having
sickened in the trenches before Santiago.

His father's services as division medical officer in Sheridan's cavalry
had been, perhaps, no more devoted, no more loyal than the services of
thousands of officers and troopers; and his reward was a pension offer,
declined. He practised until his wife died, then retired to his country
home, from which house his daughter Nina was married to Austin Gerard.

Mr. Selwyn, senior, continued to pay his taxes on his father's house in
Tenth Street, voted in that district, spent a month every year with the
Gerards, read a Republican morning newspaper, and judiciously enlarged
the family reservation in Greenwood--whither he retired, in due time,
without other ostentation than half a column in the _Evening Post_,
which paper he had, in life, avoided.

The first gun off the Florida Keys sent Selwyn's only brother from his
law office in hot haste to San Antonio--the first _etape_ on his first
and last campaign with Wood's cavalry.

That same gun interrupted Selwyn's connection with Neergard & Co.,
operators in Long Island real estate; and, a year later, the captaincy
offered him in a Western volunteer regiment operating on the Island of
Leyte, completed the rupture.

* * * * *

And now he was back again, a chance career ended, with option of picking
up