vidence of Hardy's poisoning.

Mortified and angry, he remained there, while the crowds surged by, his
gaze dully fixed on the pavement. For a time he saw nothing, and then
at last he was conscious that a rose--a crushed and wilted rose, thrown
down by some careless pedestrian--was lying almost at his feet.
Somehow, it brought him a sense of calm and sweetness; it seemed a
symbol, vouchsafed him here in the hot, sordid thoroughfare, where
crime and folly, virtue and despair, stalk arm in arm eternally.

He could not look upon the bit of trampled beauty, thus wasted on a
heedless throng, and think of Dorothy as guilty. She had seemed just
as crushed and wilted as the rose when he left her at her home--just as
beautiful, also, and as far from her garden of peace and fragrances as
this rejected handful of petals. She must be innocent. There must be
some other explanation for the loss of that cigar--and some good reason
for the things she had done and said.

He took up the rose, indifferent to anyone who might have observed the
action with a smile or a sneer, and slowly proceeded down the street.

The cigar, he reflected, might easily have been stolen in the Subway.
A hundred men had crushed against him. Any one of them so inclined
could have taken the weed at his pleasure. The thought was wholly
disquieting, since if any man attempted to bite the cigar-end through,
to smoke, he would pay a tragic penalty for his petty theft.

This aspect of the affair, indeed, grew terrible, the more he thought
upon it. He almost felt he must run to the station, try to search out
that particular train, and cry for all to hear that the stolen cigar
would be fatal--but the thought was a wild, unreasoning vagary; he was
absolutely helpless in the case.

He could not be certain that the weed had thus been extracted from his
pocket. It might in some manner have been lost. He did not know--he
could not know. He felt sure of one thing only--his hope, his demand,
that Dorothy must be innocent and good.

Despite his arguments, he was greatly depressed. The outcome of all
the business loomed dim and uncertain before him, a haze charged with
mystery, involving crime as black as night.

He presently came to the intersection of fashionable Fifth Avenue and
Forty-second Street, and was halted by the flood of traffic. Hundreds
of vehicles were pouring up and down, in endless streams, while two
calm policemen halted the moving processi