that's all I'm good for ... to go round and round ...
you know it quite well!" cried Lily, her face drawn with impotent anger.
"I know what you can do. Look here: would you like to be above the New
Trickers? Would you like to top the bill? Are you ready to do everything
for that?"

"May God forgive you for mocking at me!"

"Will you top the bill?" asked Jimmy again, in an accent that sent a
thrill down her back. "Answer me: yes or no?"

"Yes," cried Lily. "My life, everything, damn it!"

AMONG THE STARS

I

Jimmy was greatly excited when Lily had given him her answer and he led
her to the Astrarium. To understand his feelings fully, one would have to
know his life since the evening when, at Whitcomb Mansions, he had looked
Lily in the face and told her no. He realized then, from the emotion which
he experienced, how great a place Lily had filled in his heart, the little
passenger from New York to Liverpool; the girl who came to see him in his
shop in Gresse Street; the Lily whom he dreamed of "helping out of that"
when he saw her on the stage, from up in the fly-galleries; the one whom
he had tried to take away from Trampy; the poor sick girl in Berlin; those
Lilies whom he felt moving inside him, around him, like a breath of April;
all those Lilies, he had broken with them all! Oh, it was hard! Lily
should never, never know what courage he had needed to keep silent, he,
the man she thought so cold, nor what a tempest ... oh, if she could only
have seen into him! And then ... he had not met her again....

He, after his engagement at the Hippodrome, went off to America; Lily
traveled on her part. Also, he was a prey to his fixed idea, his great
project, always: his ambition increased, the same longing for success
which, formerly, in Gresse Street, had made him spend nights in study
after days of toil, at the time when, under Lily's influence, his roaming
thoughts built castles in the air, when he felt awakening within himself
his racial instinct as an heroic seeker after profitable adventures.

And his ambition took great strides forward, was not limited, as in
Clifton's case, to upsetting the fat freaks or training New Zealanders to
spin round and round. He dreamed of a useful life, based upon his own
efforts. He wished to found his future upon a discovery of his own, which
had long haunted him and which had ripened in Berlin, between his flights
in "Bridging the Abyss," a thing at which he worked incess