, in yielding, my principle remains
unchanged. I owe it to you to say this much, for you have dealt with me
as man to man."

"Mr. Van Ostend, we may both be in the wrong, as you say; if it prove
so, I shall be the first to acknowledge my error to you. My one thought
has been to save that mother further agony and to give a man, still
young, another chance."

"I've understood it so."

He went to his writing table, sat down at it, and, for a moment, busied
himself with making out his personal check for one hundred thousand
dollars payable to the Flamsted Granite Quarries Company. He handed it
to Father Honore to look at. The priest read it.

"Whatever bail is needed, if an arrest should follow now," said Mr. Van
Ostend further and significantly, "I will be responsible for."

The two men clasped hands and looked understandingly into each other's
eyes. What each read therein, what each felt in the other's palm beats,
they realized there was no need to express in words.

"Let me hear, Father Honore, so soon as you learn anything definite;
I'll keep you posted so far as I hear."

"I will. Good night, Mr. Van Ostend."

* * * * *

On reaching the iron gates to the courtyard, the priest stepped aside to
give unimpeded passage to a carriage just leaving the house. As it
passed him, the electric light flashed athwart the bowed glass front,
already dripping with sleet, and behind it he caught a glimpse of a
girl's delicate face that rose from out the folds of a chinchilla wrap,
like a flower from its sheath. She was chatting gaily with her maid.

II

The night was wild. New York can show such in late November. A gale from
the northeast was driving before it a heavy sleet that froze as it
fell, coating the overhead wires and glazing the asphalt and sidewalks.

It lacked an hour of midnight. From Fleischmann's bakery, the goal of
each man among the shivering hundreds lined up on Tenth Street, the
light streamed out upon a remnant of Life's jetsam--that which is
submerged, which never comes to the surface unless drawn there by some
searching and rescuing hand; that which the home-sheltered never see by
daylight, never know, save from hearsay. In the neighboring rectory of
Grace Church one dim light was burning in an upper room. The marble
church itself looked a part of the winter scene; its walls and
pinnacles, already encrusted with ice crystals, glittered fantastically
in the rays of th