rtiness.

"I was passing and found you were still here, so I dropped in to walk up
with you," explained Perry, but there was a note in his voice which
caused the other to glance at him quickly with a start.

"Are you ill, old man?" asked Adams, for Perry appeared at his first
look to have gone deadly white. "Is there anything that I can do? Would
you like to come up and talk things over?"

Perry shook his head with a smile which cast a sickly light over his
large, handsome face. "Oh, I'm perfectly well," he responded, "I need to
stretch my legs a bit, that's all."

"You do look as if you wanted exercise," commented Adams, as they left
the building; "too much terrapin has put your liver wrong, I guess."

At the corner, they passed a news-stand, and as Adams stopped for his
evening paper, he noticed again the nervous agony which afflicted Perry
during the brief delay.

"Look here, what's up, now?" he enquired, holding his paper in his hand
when they started on again, "are you in any trouble and can I help to
get you out? I'll do anything you like except play the gallant, and I
only draw the line at that because of my temperamental disability. So,
something _is_ wrong?" he added gayly, "for you haven't even observed
the pretty woman ahead there in the pea-green bonnet."

"Oh, I'm not in any mess just now," replied Perry, with a big,
affectionate shake like that of a wet Newfoundland dog.

Adams threw a keener glance at him. "No scrape about a woman, then?" he
asked, with the tolerant sympathy which had made him so beloved by his
own sex.

"Oh, Lord, no," ejaculated Perry, with a fervour too convincing to be
assumed.

"And you haven't lost in Wall Street?"

"On the other hand I made a jolly deal."

"Well, I give it up," remarked Adams cheerfully; then as he spoke, the
glare from an electric light fell full upon the headlines of the folded
paper in his hand, and he came to a halt so sudden that Perry, falling
back to keep step with him, felt himself spinning like a wound up top.

"My God!" said Adams, in a voice so low that it barely reached Perry's
ears. An instant later a quick animal passion--the passion of the
enraged male--entered into his tone and he walked quickly across the
pavement to the sheltering dusk of a cross street. "May God damn him for
this!" he cried in a hoarse whisper.

Following rapidly in his footsteps, Perry caught up behind him, and made
an impulsive, nerveless clutch at the unfolded