oin, stood up above him. By tilting his head
he could look directly at it through an opening in the dusty,
electric-brightened boughs. The stars were pin-pricks here and there in
the dense sky. The city flaunted its easy splendor triumphantly before
their pallid insignificance. Tarnished purities, forgotten ecstasies,
burned-out inspirations--so the city shouted raucously to its faded
firmament.

Dickie's fingers slid into his pocket. The moon had reminded him of his
one remaining dime. He might have bought a night's lodging with it, but
after one experience of such lodgings he preferred his present quarters.
In Dickie's mind there was no association of shame or ignominy with a
night spent under the sky. But fear and ignominy tainted and clung to
his memory of that other night. He had saved his dime deliberately,
going hungry rather than admit to himself that he was absolutely at the
end of his resources. To-morrow he would not especially need that dime.
He had a job. He would begin to draw pay. In his own phrasing he would
"buy him a square meal and rent him a room somewhere." Upon these two
prospects his brain fastened with a leech-like persistency. And yet
above anything he had faced in his life he dreaded the job and the room.
The inspiration of his flight, the impulse that had sped him out of
Millings like a fire-tipped arrow, that determination to find Sheila, to
rehabilitate himself in her esteem, to serve her, to make a fresh start,
had fallen from him like a dead flame. The arrow-flight was spent. He
had not found Sheila. He had no way of finding her. She was not at her
old address. Her father's friend, the Mr. Hazeldean that had brought
Sylvester to Marcus's studio, knew nothing of her. Mrs. Halligan, her
former landlady, knew nothing of her. Dickie, having summoned Mrs.
Halligan to her doorsill, had looked past her up the narrow, steep
staircase. "Did she live away up there?" he had asked. "Yes, sorr. And
't was a climb for the poor little crayture, but there was days when
she'd come down it like a burrd to meet her Pa." Dickie had faltered,
white and empty-hearted, before the kindly Irishwoman who remembered so
vividly Sheila's downward, winged rush of welcome. For several hours
after his visit to the studio building he had wandered aimlessly about,
then his hunger had bitten at him and he had begun to look for work. It
was not difficult to find. A small restaurant displayed a need of
waiters. Dickie applied