emen," accosted Burton. "How are you all today?"

With three silent nods the trio at the door turned and drifted aimlessly
across to the billiard-room.

Tom Burton went and sat alone by a window. Slowly a brick-like flush
spread and deepened on his full face. This club life had become very
important to him--even indispensable. There was nothing with which to
replace it. He wheeled his chair so that he might be plainly seen from
the door, and as man after man came in, with whom he had spent his time
and his son's money, men who had been pleased to court the father of the
great Hamilton Montagu Burton, he genially accosted them--and one after
another they returned greetings of frigid formality.

Then he turned his chair with its back to the room and looked out and
the stubborn pride died in his eyes and his face grew old and pathetic.
There was no further room for doubt. He was tasting ostracism and being
included in this wave of hatred for his son, which he had regarded as
newspaper rubbish. He leaned forward with his gloved hands on his cane
and once or twice under his fastidiously trimmed beard, his lips
twitched painfully. Finally he rose, ordering his next cocktail over a
hotel bar, and though the stubbornness of pride forced him back on the
morrow to lunch at his accustomed club table, he lunched alone, and was
grateful for the solicitous courtesy of the negro who served him.

* * * * *

One afternoon Paul made his way down Fifth avenue on foot.

The sky was unbelievably blue and a flashing brilliancy sparkled in all
the splinters of color that embroidered themselves along the parquetry
of the street. The avenue has, at times, a magic of its own and today it
was a swiftly flowing stream of brilliancy and life and laughter. But
this was a mood to which Paul Burton found no response. His heart was
attuned to echoes of a more somber tone--and he was bound on a mission
which was, for him, a bold one. He was disobeying orders which until now
he had not ventured to disobey. Marcia Terroll had banished him from her
presence. Since that day in her apartment he had seen less of her than
before and for many weeks now nothing at all. Marcia, unlike Loraine
Haswell, recognized that they could not meet without dangerous drifting,
and that such drifting could end only in disaster, so at last she had
forbidden his visiting her even occasionally and to all his arguments
she had steadfastly shaken