nose,
his red blunt hands dangling as he walked. Behind him a lackey laughed.

* * * * *

In due time Neergard, who still spent his penny on a morning paper, read
about the Orchil ball. There were three columns and several pictures. He
read all there was to read about--the sickeningly minute details of
jewels and costumes, the sorts of stuffs served at supper, the cotillon,
the favours--then, turning back, he read about the dozen-odd separate
hostesses who had entertained the various coteries and sets at separate
dinners before the ball--read every item, every name, to the last
imbecile period.

Then he rose wearily, and started downtown to see what his lawyers could
do toward reinstating him in a club that had expelled him--to find out
if there remained the slightest trace of a chance in the matter. But
even as he went he knew there could be none. The squid had had its will
with him, not he with the squid; and within him rose again all the old
hatred and fear of these people from whom he had desired to extract full
payment for the black days of need he had endured, for the want, the
squalor, the starvation he had passed through.

But the reckoning left him where he had started--save for the money they
had used when he forced it on them--not thanking him.

So he went to his lawyers--every day for a while, then every week,
then, toward the end of winter, less often, for he had less time now,
and there was a new pressure which he was beginning to feel vaguely
hostile to him in his business enterprises--hitches in the negotiations
of loans, delays, perhaps accidental, but annoying; changes of policy in
certain firms who no longer cared to consider acreage as investment; and
a curiously veiled antagonism to him in a certain railroad, the
reorganisation of which he had dared once to aspire to.

And one day, sitting alone in his office, a clerk brought him a morning
paper with one column marked in a big blue-pencilled oval.

It was only about a boy and a girl who had run away and married because
they happened to be in love, although their parents had prepared other
plans for their separate disposal. The column was a full one, the
heading in big type--a good deal of pother about a boy and a girl, after
all, particularly as it appeared that their respective families had
determined to make the best of it. Besides, the girl's parents had other
daughters growing up; and the prettiest of Americ