motion with his hand to
indicate that she was to go. Shut in alone, he buried his face in his
arms. "What madness!" he groaned. "If I loved her, there'd be some
excuse for me. But I don't. I couldn't. Yet I seem ready to ruin
everything, merely to gratify a selfish whim--an insane whim."

On top of the papers she had left he saw a separate slip. He drew it
toward him, spread it out before him. Her address. An unknown street in
Jersey City!

"I'll not go," he said aloud, pushing the slip away. Go? Certainly not.
He had never really meant to go. He would, of course, keep his
engagement with Josephine. "And I'll not come down town until she has
taken another job and has caught Tetlow. I'll stop this idiocy of trying
to make an impression on a person not worth impressing. What weak
vanity--to be piqued by this girl's lack of interest!"

Nevertheless--he at six o'clock telephoned to the Burroughs' house that
he was detained down town. He sent away his motor, dined alone in the
station restaurant in Jersey City. And at half past seven he set out in
a cab in search of--what? He did not dare answer that interrogation.

VI

Life many another chance explorer from New York, Norman was surprised to
discover that, within a few minutes of leaving the railway station, his
cab was moving through a not unattractive city. He expected to find the
Hallowells in a tenement in some more or less squalid street overhung
with railway smoke and bedaubed with railway grime. He was delighted
when the driver assured him that there was no mistake, that the
comfortable little cottage across the width of the sidewalk and a small
front yard was the sought-for destination.

"Wait, please," he said to the cabman. "Or, if you like, you can go to
that corner saloon down there. I'll know where to find you." And he gave
him half a dollar.

The cabman hesitated between two theories of this conduct--whether it
was the generosity it seemed or was a ruse to "side step" payment.
He--or his thirst--decided for the decency of human nature; he drove
confidingly away. Norman went up the tiny stoop and rang. The sound of a
piano, in the room on the ground floor where there was light, abruptly
ceased. The door opened and Miss Hallowell stood before him. She was
throughout a different person from the girl of the office. She had
changed to a tight-fitting pale-blue linen dress made all in one piece.
Norman could now have not an instant's doubt about the