d and she would. She set her small mouth firmly, and
confronted the future; she saw herself, without his strength to support
her, going down and down. She remembered those drabs of the street on
whom she had turned such cynical eyes in her virtuous youth, and she saw
herself one of that lost sisterhood, sodden, hectic, hopeless.

When Willy Cameron left the pharmacy that day it was almost noon. He
went to the house of mourning first, and found Mr. Davis in a chair in
a closed room, a tired little man in a new black necktie around a not
over-clean collar, his occupation of years gone, confronting a new and
terrible leisure that he did not know how to use.

"You know how it is, Willy," he said, blinking his reddened eyelids.
"You kind of wish sometimes that you had somebody to help you bear your
burden, and then it's taken away, but you're kind of bent over and used
to it. And you'd give your neck and all to have it back."

Willy Cameron pondered that on his way up the street.

There was one great longing in him, to see Lily again. In a few hours
now he would have taken a wife, and whatever travesty of marriage
resulted, he would have to keep away from Lily. He meant to play square
with Edith.

He wondered if it would hurt Lily to see him, remind her of things she
must be trying to forget. He decided in the end that it would hurt her,
so he did not go. But he walked, on his way to see Pink Denslow at the
temporary bank, through a corner of the park near the house, and took a
sort of formal and heart-breaking farewell of her.

Time had been when life had seemed only a long, long trail, with Lily at
the end of it somewhere, like water to the thirsty traveler, or home to
the wanderer; like a camp fire at night. But now, life seemed to him a
broad highway, infinitely crowded, down which he must move, surrounded
yet alone.

But at least he could walk in the middle of the road, in the sunlight.
It was the weaklings who were crowded to the side. He threw up his head.

It had never occurred to him that he was in any, danger, either from
Louis Akers or from the unseen enemy he was fighting. He had a curious
lack of physical fear. But once or twice that day, as he went about,
he happened to notice a small man, foreign in appearance and shabbily
dressed. He saw him first when he came out of the marriage license
office, and again when he entered the bank.

He had decided to tell Pink of his approaching marriage and to ask hi