ooded with light. He
glanced in, and recoiled.

II

Oddly enough, the first thing he noticed in the confusion that reigned
was the absence of the piano. Two chairs were overturned, and one of
them was broken; a siphon of vichy lay on the floor beside a crushed
glass and two or three of the cheap ornaments that had been swept off
the mantel and broken on the gaudy tiles of the hearth. He glanced at
the woman, who had ceased crying, and stood surveying the wreckage with
the calmness, the philosophic nonchalance of a class that comes to look
upon misfortune as inevitable.

"They didn't do a thing to this place, did they?" was her comment.
"There was two guys in here to-night who got a notion they were funny."

Hodder had thought to have fathomed all the horrors of her existence,
but it was not until he looked into this room that the bottomless
depths of it were brought home to him. Could it be possible that the
civilization in which he lived left any human being so defenceless as to
be at the mercy of the ghouls who had been here? The very stale odours
of the spilled whiskey seemed the material expression of the essence
of degraded souls; for a moment it overpowered him. Then came the
imperative need of action, and he began to right one of the chairs. She
darted forward.

"Cut it out!" she cried. "What business have you got coming in here and
straightening up? I was a fool to bring you, anyway."

It was in her eyes that he read her meaning, and yet could not credit
it. He was abashed--ashamed; nay, he could not define the feeling in
his breast. He knew that what he read was the true interpretation of
her speech, for in some manner--he guessed not how--she had begun to
idealize him, to feel that the touch of these things defiled him.

"I believe I invited myself," he answered, with attempted cheerfulness.
Then it struck him, in his predicament, that this was precisely what
others had done!

"When you asked me a little while ago whether I had left the Church, I
let you think I had. I am still connected with St. John's, but I do not
know how long I shall continue to be."

She was on her knees with dustpan and whiskbroom, cleaning up the
fragments of glass on the stained carpet. And she glanced up at him
swiftly, diviningly.

"Say--you're in trouble yourself, ain't you?"

She got up impulsively, spilling some of the contents of the pan. A
subtle change had come in her, and under the gallantly drooping feather