Donaldson went out the door. He groped his way down the stairs into
the street. Once he swung abruptly on his heel and stared at the
pavement behind him. He thought he heard at his heels the scratching
padded tread of the pup.

CHAPTER II

_King of To-day_

Donaldson pressed his way along the lighted streets, clutching the vial
in his pocket with the thrill of a man holding the key to fretting
shackles. One week of life with the future eliminated; one week with no
reckoning to be made at the end; one week with every human fetter struck
off; one week in which to ignore every curbing law of futurity and
abandon himself to the joy of the present! The future--even the narrow
bounds of an earthly future--holds men prisoners. A few careless dogs,
to be sure, live their day, blind to the years to come, but that is brute
stupidity. A few brave souls swagger through their prime with some
bravado, knowing the final cost, but willing to pay it by installments
through the dribbling years which follow; but the usury of time makes
that folly. The wise choke such gypsy impulses--admit the mortgage of
the Present to the Future--and surrender the brisk liberty of youth to
the limping freedom of old age. But Donaldson was too thoughtful a man
to belong to either the first or second class and yet of too lusty stuff
to join the third.

There were now just two doubtful points which checked him in his first
impulse to swallow the deadly elixir at once,--two questions needing
further thought before he would have a clear conscience about it; he must
convince himself a trifle more clearly that he shifted nothing to the
load of those he left behind, and he must make sure that no element of
fear entered into his act. That phrase of Barstow's, "It's quitting not
to stay," smarted a bit.

In spite of these vital problems, Donaldson was keenly conscious, even
with his wild freedom still nothing but a conception, of sharpened senses
which responded keenly to the lights and sounds about him. This bottle
which he held made him feel like some old time king's messenger who
carried a warrant making him exempt from local laws. He moved among
people whose perplexed thoughts wandered restlessly down the everlasting
vista of the days ahead, and he alone of them all knew the secret of
being untroubled beyond the week. The world had not for ten years
appeared so gay to him. He felt the exhilarating sting of life as he had
when it f