moans
came quavering from her lips. She needed no explanation of what that
suddenly limp body meant! And she understood better now, too, that
untouched lump of clay upon the boards beside his bowed head. John
Anderson's long task was finished. He had known it was finished, and
had been merely resting tonight--resting content before he started
upon that long journey, before he followed that face, tumbled of hair
and uplifted of lip, which seemed always to be calling to him.

The slim-bodied girl whose face was so like what that other woman's
face had been went slowly across to him where he sat. After a while
she slipped her arm about his wasted shoulders, just as she had done
so often on other nights. A racking sob shook her when she first tried
to speak--and she tried again.

"You kept faith, didn't you, dear?" she whispered to him. "Oh, but you
kept faith with her--right--right up to the end. Please God--please
God, I may get my chance back again--to try to keep it, too. You've
gone to her--and--and I'm glad! You waited a long time, dear, and you
were very patient. But, oh, you've left me--you've left me all
alone!"

The tears came then. Great, searing drops that had been hopelessly
dammed back the night before rolled down her thin cheeks. She stooped
and touched the silvered head with her lips before she groped her way
into the other room and found her chair at the table.

"He knew I was there with him," she tried to whisper. "He knew I was,
I know! But I wish I could tell him I'm sorry. Oh, I wish I could!"

And Old Jerry found her so, head pillowed upon her outstretched arms,
her hair in a marvelous shimmering mass across her little shoulders
when he came the next morning, almost before the day was fairly begun,
to tell her all the things there were for him to tell.

CHAPTER XII

Monday morning was always a busy morning in Jesse Hogarty's Fourteenth
Street gymnasium; busy, that is to say, along about that hour when
morning was almost ready to slip into early afternoon. The reason for
this late activity was very easy to understand, too, once one realized
that Hogarty's clientele--especially that of his Monday mornings--was
composed quite entirely of that type of leisurely young man who rarely
pointed the nose of his tub-seated raceabout below Forty-second
Street, except for the benefits of a few rather desultory rounds under
Hogarty's tutelage, a shocking plunge beneath an icy shower, and the
all pe