s bug
about writing stories he's taken to rambling around town at night. I
said he didn't seem to want companions, but when he goes out on these
prowls he'll talk for hours with any dirty old bum that stops him and he
always falls for pan-handling. Beggars, street-walkers, any sort of old
down-and-outer interests him, if it's hard luck they're talking."

But the face which reminded Mr. Rathbone of the man who was awaiting the
electric chair was the public face of Stuart Farquaharson. He did not
see the same features during the hours when the door of his room was
closed. The hotel he had selected, near Washington Square, was a modest
place and his window looked out over roofs and chimney-pots and small
back yards.

There, sitting before his typewriter, his sleeves rolled above his
elbows, he sought to devote himself to his newly chosen profession: the
profession which he had substituted for law. Through a near-by window he
had occasional glimpses of a girl who was evidently trying to be an
illustrator. Stuart imagined that she was poor and ambitious, and he
envied her the zest of her struggle for success. He himself had no such
incentives. Poverty was not likely to touch him unless he became a
reckless waster, and he fancied that his interests were too far burned
to ashes for ambition. It was with another purpose that he forced
himself to his task. He was trying to forget dark hair and eyes and the
memory of a voice which had said, "Love you! In every way that I know
how to love, I love you. Everything that a woman can be to a man, I want
to be to you, and everything that a woman can give a man, I want to give
you."

And because he sought so hard to forget her, his fingering of the
typewriter keys would fall idle, and his eyes, looking out across the
chimney-pots, would soar with the circling pigeons, and he would see her
again in every guise that he remembered--and he remembered them all.

She had been cruel to the point of doing the one thing which he had told
her would brand him with the deepest possible misery--and which pledged
him in honor not to approach her again by word or letter without
permission. But that was only because the thing which he conceived to be
her heritage of narrowness had conquered her.

On the floor below was a young man of about his own age, who was also a
candidate for the laurels in literature. Stuart had met him by chance
and they had talked a little. This man's enthusiasms had gushed