d lose her a faithful and useful slave she had sought
to check his course. Her threat of the severance of their relations had
held him up for a little time, and she began to believe that he was safe
again. He went back to the work he had neglected, drank moderately, and
acted in most things as a sound, sensible being. Then, all of a sudden,
he went down again, and went down badly. She kept her promise and threw
him over. Then he became a hanger-on at the clubs, a genteel loafer. He
used to say in his sober moments that at last he was one of the boys
that Sadness had spoken of. He did not work, and yet he lived and ate
and was proud of his degradation. But he soon tired of being separated
from Hattie, and straightened up again. After some demur she received
him upon his former footing. It was only for a few months. He fell
again. For almost four years this had happened intermittently. Finally
he took a turn for the better that endured so long that Hattie Sterling
again gave him her faith. Then the woman made her mistake. She warmed to
him. She showed him that she was proud of him. He went forth at once to
celebrate his victory. He did not return to her for three days. Then he
was battered, unkempt, and thick of speech.

She looked at him in silent contempt for a while as he sat nursing his
aching head.

"Well, you 're a beauty," she said finally with cutting scorn. "You
ought to be put under a glass case and placed on exhibition."

He groaned and his head sunk lower. A drunken man is always disarmed.

His helplessness, instead of inspiring her with pity, inflamed her with
an unfeeling anger that burst forth in a volume of taunts.

"You 're the thing I 've given up all my chances for--you, a miserable,
drunken jay, without a jay's decency. No one had ever looked at you
until I picked you up and you 've been strutting around ever since,
showing off because I was kind to you, and now this is the way you pay
me back. Drunk half the time and half drunk the rest. Well, you know
what I told you the last time you got 'loaded'? I mean it too. You 're
not the only star in sight, see?"

She laughed meanly and began to sing, "You 'll have to find another baby
now."

For the first time he looked up, and his eyes were full of tears--tears
both of grief and intoxication. There was an expression of a whipped dog
on his face.

"Do'--Ha'ie, do'--" he pleaded, stretching out his hands to her.

Her eyes blazed back at him, but she