Griswold."

"Damn the money!" he exploded; and the malediction came out of a full
heart.

"If you would only say you are sorry," she went on sadly, groping only
half-purposefully for the bell-push which would summon the custodian.
"You are sorry, aren't you?"

Unconsciously he had taken her former pose, with his back to the wall
and his hands behind him.

"I ought to be decent enough to lie to you and say that I am," he
returned, hardily. "I know you can't understand; you are too good and
innocent to understand. I'm ashamed; that is, the civilized part of me
is ashamed; but that is all. Knowing that he ought to be in the dust at
your feet, the brutal other-man is unrepentant and riotously jubilant
because, for a brief second or two, he was able to break away and----"

Her fingers had found the bell-push and were pressing it. When the
custodian opened the door, Miss Grierson was her poiseful self again.

"Number three-forty-five-A is Mr. Kenneth Griswold's box, now," she
announced briefly. "Please register it in his name, and then help him to
put it away and lock it up."

Griswold went through the motions with the key-bearing young woman
half-absently. By this time he was fathoms deep in the reactionary
undertow. Must the recovered treasure always transform itself into a
millstone to drag him down into some new and untried depth of
degradation? Thrice he had given it up for lost, and in each instance
its reappearance had been the signal for a relapse into primitive
barbarism, for a plunge into the moral under-depths out of which he had
each time emerged distinctively and definitely the loser. Was it to be
always thus? Could it be even remotely possible that in a candidly
material world there could still be standing-room for the myths and
portents and superstitious traditions?

He was trying to persuade himself that there could not be standing-room
when he rejoined Margery--herself the best imaginable refutation of the
old-wives' tales--at the gate in the great steel grille. Man-like, he
was ready to be forgiven and comforted; and there was at least oblivion
in her charming little shudder as the custodian shot the bolts of the
gate to let them out.

"_Br-r-r!_" she shivered, "I can never stand here and look at the free
people out there without fancying myself in a prison. It must be a
dreadful thing to be shut away behind bolts and bars, forgotten by
everybody, and yet yourself unable to forget. Do you ever ha