me if I who am engaged to marry Judge Granger
were to stand here and let you criticise him. There is a limit to most
things, isn't there?"

"There is," agreed Jimmy, soberly. "You are quite right in your
attitude. I'm helpless." He paused, got to his feet, buttoned his coat,
looked absently for his hat, found it on the window ledge, and seemed
undecided. It was the old, boyish impulsiveness that made him turn to
her in what he believed to be a parting and say, "But--Mary! Mary Allen!
It doesn't matter what I am, or anything about the accidents and the
misunderstandings--nothing matters now--to me--only this, that--that you
believe that I was honest to you and to myself when you were but Mary
Allen, and I but Bill Jones!"

"No," she said, "nothing else matters. That is something quite yours and
mine--our own. Conditions are about as we all make them for ourselves.
Sometimes they run away from us. But we can't alter things that have
been. This has been a mixup. Neither of us could help it."

He could find nothing to say, for he seemed involved in a cataclysm that
had crushed him, and so moved toward the door. She walked by his side
and stepped back when he opened it. He held out his hand as if to bid
her good-by, for the last time, but she appeared to disregard it and
stood quietly by his side.

"It--it seems a travesty--a blunder," she said, at last. "I--I don't
know quite what to do about it all! I feel as if this were a farewell.
I--I don't like to think of it as such. You have been so kind, and so
encouraging, and you are so frank and--Can't we have one day more? Can't
you come back to-morrow afternoon,--here--and be just Bill Jones, the
Pirate, for another day? I think we'd be happier--afterward--if you
could, and if we could forget certain things. Say you will come."

And as he walked dejectedly up the narrow confines of the blind little
alley after leaving her he loathed himself for his weakness in promising
that he would.

CHAPTER XVI

It's a long way from MacDougall Alley to Fort George at any time. It is
rendered longer when the wind is chill; but Jimmy, no longer the jester,
could never remember how he reached there on that wintry afternoon, and
its hills, bleak with snow, were no more drab and cold than the dead
fires of his dreams. The skies above were leaden, with no ray of
sunlight. Away behind him the smoke of the city seemed leveled like a
shroud. Its distant monotone of sound became a dir