He stood in mute acceptance of her scrutiny, recognizing her right, since he had asked so much. Before she spoke, he knew her answer, seeing it foreshadowed in the gray eyes.

"If you wish to very much. But--not too soon again."

She stepped from the curb, allowing no reply, but without apparent haste, pushing the carriage in which the baby chuckled and twisted to peep back at her. He watched her thread her way through the rushing lines of pleasure traffic; saw her reach the other side and disappear behind a knoll clothed with turf and evergreens that rose between them. The woman from whose presence he had come to this chance encounter once had told him that any human being looked absurd propelling a baby-coach. He recalled that statement now, and did not find it true. It was such a sane thing to do, so natural and good. At least, it seemed so when this girl did it. He envied the man, whoever he might be, who did, or would love her; envied him the clean simplicity she would make of life and the absence of hateful complications.

People were glancing curiously at his motionless figure; he aroused himself and walked on. He had chosen his own way of living, he angrily told himself; there was no excuse for whining if he did not like the place where free-will had led him. Yet--had he? Or had he, instead, been trapped? The doubt was ugly. He walked faster to escape it, but it ran at his heels like one of those sinister demon-animals of medieval legend.

Across the blackening river electric signs were flashing into view; gigantic affairs insolently shouldering themselves into the unwilling attention, as indeed they were designed to do by Jersey's desire for the greater city's patronage. Looking toward one of these, the man read it with a sullen distaste: "Adriance's Paper." That simple announcement marked an industry, even a monopoly, great enough to have been subjected more than once to the futile investigations of an uneasy government.

The family name was sufficiently unusual, the family fortune sufficiently well known to have been bracketted together for him wherever he had gone. In school, in college, and later, always he had found a courier whisper running officiously before him, "Young Adriance--paper, you know. Millions!" And always it had led him into trouble; at twenty-six he was just commencing to realize that fact. The trouble never had been very serious until now. He never had committed anything his mother's church would have called a mortal sin. Even yet he stood only on the verge of commission. But he could not 

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