will you feel about it then? Speak!"

"I shall feel as I do now. I know you don't think that way, and I don't
blame you--or anybody. But if I have got to say how I shall feel, why,
I shall feel sorry they didn't succeed, for I believe they have a
righteous cause, though they go the wrong way to help themselves."

His father came close to him, his eyes blazing, his teeth set. "Do you
dare so say that to me?"

"Yes. I can't help it. I pity them; my whole heart is with those poor
men."

"You impudent puppy!" shouted the old man. He lifted his hand and struck
his son in the face. Conrad caught his hand with his own left, and,
while the blood began to trickle from a wound that Christine's intaglio
ring had made in his temple, he looked at him with a kind of grieving
wonder, and said, "Father!"

The old man wrenched his fist away and ran out of the house. He
remembered his address now, and he gave it as he plunged into the coupe.
He trembled with his evil passion, and glared out of the windows at the
passers as he drove home; he only saw Conrad's mild, grieving, wondering
eyes, and the blood slowly trickling from the wound in his temple.

Conrad went to the neat-set bowl in Fulkerson's comfortable room and
washed the blood away, and kept bathing the wound with the cold water
till it stopped bleeding. The cut was not deep, and he thought he
would not put anything on it. After a while he locked up the office and
started out, he hardly knew where. But he walked on, in the direction
he had taken, till he found himself in Union Square, on the pavement
in front of Brentano's. It seemed to him that he heard some one calling
gently to him, "Mr. Dryfoos!"

V.

Conrad looked confusedly around, and the same voice said again, "Mr.
Dryfoos!" and he saw that it was a lady speaking to him from a coupe
beside the curbing, and then he saw that it was Miss Vance.

She smiled when, he gave signs of having discovered her, and came up to
the door of her carriage. "I am so glad to meet you. I have been longing
to talk to somebody; nobody seems to feel about it as I do. Oh, isn't it
horrible? Must they fail? I saw cars running on all the lines as I came
across; it made me sick at heart. Must those brave fellows give in?
And everybody seems to hate them so--I can't bear it." Her face was
estranged with excitement, and there were traces of tears on it. "You
must think me almost crazy to stop you in the street this way; but when
I ca