asion of privacy that it
can get and still feel respectable."

"The Ledger doesn't go in for that sort of thing."

"Not as much as some of the others. But a little more each year. It
follows the trend." He got up, quenched his pipe, and reached for his
hat. "Drop in here about seven-thirty when you feel like hearing the old
man maunder," he said with his slight, friendly smile.

Rising, Banneker leaned over to him. "Who's the man at the next table?"
he asked in a low voice, indicating a tall, broad, glossily dressed
diner who was sipping his third _demi-tasse_, in apparent detachment
from the outside world.

"His name is Marrineal," replied the veteran. "He dines here
occasionally alone. Don't know what he does."

"He's been listening in."

"Curious thing; he often does."

As they parted at the door, Edmonds said paternally:

"Remember, young fellow, a Park Row reputation is written on glass with
a wet finger. It doesn't last during the writing."

"And only dims the glass," said Banneker reflectively.

CHAPTER VIII

Heat, sudden, savage, and oppressive, bore down upon the city early that
spring, smiting men in their offices, women in their homes, the horses
between the shafts of their toil, so that the city was in danger of
becoming disorganized. The visitation developed into the big story of
successive days. It was the sort of generalized, picturesque
"fluff-stuff" matter which Banneker could handle better than his
compeers by sheer imaginative grasp and deftness of presentation. Being
now a writer on space, paid at the rate of eight dollars a column of
from thirteen to nineteen hundred words, he found the assignment
profitable and the test of skill quite to his taste. Soft job though it
was in a way, however, the unrelenting pressure of the heat and the task
of finding, day after day, new phases and fresh phrases in which to deal
with it, made inroads upon his nerves.

He took to sleeping ill again. Io Welland had come back in all the
glamorous panoply of waking dreams to command and torment his loneliness
of spirit. At night he dreaded the return to the draughtless room on
Grove Street. In the morning, rising sticky-eyed and unrested, he shrank
from the thought of the humid, dusty, unkempt hurly-burly of the office.
Yet his work was never more brilliant and individual.

Having finished his writing, one reeking midnight, he sat, spent, at his
desk, hating the thought of the shut-in place that h