d hand of the traffic
policeman.

Finding himself jostled, he glanced languidly over his shoulder. The
needle makes for such languidness at times between its moments of
dreaming and its moments of jumping nerves.

Several men in evening-dress and fur coats surrounded him, and he knew
them all. The face of Norvil Thayre was laughing into his, and he
recognized that an evening well started had painted its flush on the
cheeks of each of them.

"My word, Burton!" laughed the Englishman. "I haven't seen you since the
war of the Roses. How goes it, lad?" Then, even in his heightened gaiety
of mood, Thayre recognized the want and distress which had left their
impress and pallor on this face, and his eyes sobered. With the other
rules of the season he felt that forgetfulness of the past accorded, so
he hastened to add, "You know these fellows. Fall in and hike along with
us. We have a table reserved at Kenley's and it's close to the platform.
I dare say we sha'n't miss many tricks."

A deep embarrassment flooded the face of the outcast. He, who had once
numbered these men among his associates, felt sensitively the pinched
poverty of his present condition and its contrast with their
Persian-lamb collars, otter-lined coats and their white shirt fronts of
evening-dress.

"Thank you," he said gravely, "I'm afraid I can't. Your party is made up
and--and--"

But as he stammered to a pause Thayre slapped him heartily on the back,
and the others, with voices of more advanced inebriety, made it a chorus
of insistence.

"'Twill do you no harm, my lad," declared the Englishman. "'A little
nonsense now and then--' You know the old saw. A bite of mixed grill and
a beaker of bubbles will buck you up, no end."

The musician hesitated, deeply tempted. To sit at table with white
damask and clear glass, and once more to eat such things as they serve
at Kenley's! The idea could not be lightly dismissed. Besides he felt
suddenly giddy and weak. He frequently felt so these days, and if he
accepted he could rest quietly until the vertigo passed.

"I say--of course," Thayre leaned forward and explained in a lowered
voice, "you go as my guest. I'm giving the party tonight."

Ten minutes later, retrieved from the street, Paul Burton sat near the
edge of the cabaret platform in a cafe where every table had been
reserved long in advance, and from whose doors many eager applicants
were being turned away.

Nearby, too, was the space reserved