despair he slowly fumbled his way up to his room,
entered, and threw himself across the bed without undressing. It was
one thing to preach, another to face the thing itself alone in the
darkness.

Through the shadows of the long night he lay with wide staring eyes,
gazing at the vision which would not vanish--the face of the woman he
loved--cold, white, pulseless, terrible in its beauty, dead.

CHAPTER VIII

STRUGGLE

The longer Stuart wrestled with the problem of Nan's yielding to the
lure of Bivens's gold the more hideous and hopeless it became. He
cursed her in one breath, and with the next stretched out his arms in
the darkness in desperate voiceless longing.

He rose at last and stood looking out his window on the moonlit Square.
He began to feel that he had been to blame. Why had he allowed the
foolish pride of a lovers' quarrel to keep them apart for two weeks? A
clock in a distant tower struck three. The radiance of the massed
lights of Broadway still glowed in the sky and dimmed the glory of the
moon. The roar of the elevated trains sounded unusually loud and
sinister. Perhaps because Bivens was on their board of directors. The
whistle of their air brakes seemed to hiss his name. A crowd of
revellers passed in a cab, with their feet out the windows, singing a
drunken song. There was something sickening in the thought of this
swiftly moving remorseless rush of a city's endless life. After all,
was Nan worse than others--thousands of others caught in the merciless
grip of its eternal spell?

The clock struck five, he looked out the window, startled by the first
soft light of the dawn.

He came downstairs, let himself out of the front door and began to walk
furiously. When at last he became conscious of his surroundings he had
reached Central Park and was seated in the little summer house on a big
pile of boulders near the Sixth Avenue entrance. The sun was rising. It
was the first sunrise he had ever seen in New York. The effect on his
imagination was startling. The red rays streaming through the park and
the chirp of birds in the bushes were magic touches that transformed
the world. He was back again in the South, where Nature is the one big
fact of life, and the memories of the girl he had learned to love
beside its beautiful waters again overwhelmed him.

He rose with a cry of pain, plunged into the crowds streaming downtown
to their work and, scarcely conscious of anything save the ache with