s to get into step with him as they proceeded. "Yes,
sir, every train through the twenty-four hours is late on this road."

Carroll laughed. "I confess that rather suits me, on the whole. I am
usually late myself."

They walked together to the ferry-slip, and the boat was just going
out.

"Always lose this boat," grumbled Lee, importantly.

Carroll looked at his watch, then replaced it silently.

"Going to miss an appointment?" questioned Lee.

"No, think not. These boats sail pretty often."

"I wish the train-service was as good," said Lee.

The two men stood together until the next boat came in, then boarded
it, and took seats outside, as it was a fine day. They separated a
couple of blocks from the pier. Lee was obliged to take an up-town
Elevated.

"I suppose you don't go my way?" he said to Carroll, wistfully.

"No," said Carroll, smiling and shaking the ashes from his cigar.
Both men had smoked all the way across--Carroll's cigars.

"And I tell you they were the real thing," Lee told his admiring wife
that night. "Cost fifteen cents apiece, if they cost a penny; no
cheap cigars for him, I can tell you."

Carroll said good-morning out of his atmosphere of fragrant smoke,
and Lee, with a parting wave of the hand, began his climb of the
Elevated stairs. He cast a backward look at Carroll's broad, gray
shoulders swinging up the street. Even a momentary glimpse was enough
to get a strong impression of the superiority of the man among the
crowd of ordinary men hastening to their offices.

"I wonder where he is going? I wonder where his office is?" Lee said
to himself, accelerating his pace a little as the station began to
quiver with an approaching train.

What Lee asked himself many another man in Banbridge asked, but no
one knew. No one dared to put the question directly to Carroll
himself.

Arthur Carroll had never been a man who opened wide all the doors of
his secrets of life to all his friends and acquaintances. Some had
one entrance, some another, and it is probable that he always
reserved ways of entrance and egress unknown to any except himself.
At the very time that he evaded the solicitude of Banbridge with
regard to his haunts in the City he was more than open, even
ostentatious concerning them to some parties in the City itself, but
he was silent regarding Banbridge. It may have been for the reason
that he did not for the present wish to mix the City and Banbridge,
that he wished to pres