ee her often,
last summer, kiting round Southampton on a bike. The old man's so mean
he wouldn't let her use the car alone.... Weedy little beggar, all legs
and eyes--skirts to her shoe-tops and hair to her waist."

"Not over eighteen, I gather?"

"Oh, not a day," little Fiske affirmed.

The elevator was waiting by this time, but Whitaker paused an instant
before taking it, chiefly because the sound of his own name, uttered by
Hamilton, had roused him out of the abstraction in which he had
overheard the preceding conversation.

"Anyhow, I'm sorry for Hugh Whitaker. He's going to take this hard,
mighty hard."

George Brenton asked, as if surprised: "What? I didn't know he was
interested in that quarter."

"You must be blind. Alice Carstairs has had him going for a year.
Everybody thought she was only waiting for him to make some big
money--he as much as anybody, I fancy."

Brenton added the last straw. "That's tough," he said soberly.
"Whitaker's a white man, and Alice Carstairs didn't deserve him. But I
wouldn't blame any man for feeling cut-up to be thrown over for an
out-and-out rotter like Percy Grimshaw...."

Whitaker heard no more. At the first mention of the name of Alice
Carstairs he had snatched her letter from his pocket and thrust his
thumb beneath the flap. Now he had withdrawn the enclosure and was
reading.

When a mean-spirited, selfish woman starts in to justify herself
(especially, on paper) for doing something thoroughly contemptible, the
result is apt to be bitterly unfair to everybody involved--except
herself. Nobody will ever know just what Alice Carstairs saw fit to
write to Hugh Whitaker when she made up her mind to run away with
another man; but there can be little doubt that they were venomous words
he read, standing there under the curious eyes of the elevator boy and
the pages. The blood ebbed from his face and left it ghastly, and when
he had torn the paper to shreds and let them flutter about his feet, he
swayed perceptibly--so much so that one of the pages took alarm and
jumped to his side.

"Beg pardon, Mr. Whitaker--did you call me?"

Whitaker steadied himself and stared until he recognized the boy. "No,"
he said thickly, "but I want you. Give me a bar order."

The boy produced the printed form and Whitaker hastily scribbled his
order on it. "Bring that up to the library," he said, "and be quick
about it."

He stumbled into the elevator, and presently found himself in the