[14]

Then he laughed and shrugged his shoulders.

“I really think the Berlin’s dinner does not set well on me,” he told himself. “I once liked New York very well. But it may be that thirty is a great deal more than ten years older than twenty. My taste for many things has slackened in those ten years, and who knows but what the big town has suffered along with the other old likings.”

Hard-worked hansoms and goblin-eyed motor-cars spun along the smooth asphalt; jeweled women and carefully attired men streamed in at the light-flooded lobbies of the theatres. Electric cars loaded with pleasure seekers flashed clanging up and down.

At Herald Square Kenyon paused. The miraculous presses, turning out the pink-tinted Telegram, held him fascinated. As he stood there, the sharp staccato of a newsboy began to reach him. At first he paid no attention to the high-pitched, complaining cry; but above the grind of cab wheels and the thousand sounds of Broadway, it gradually began to take shape in his mind.

“Extree! Eight o’clock!”

[15]The thin voice pierced the air like a thing with a point; and without actually being aware of the burden of the cry, Kenyon began to be annoyed by its abrupt dissonances.

[15]

“Full account! Great fortune! Extree!”

A great fortune! Kenyon was irritated by the idea. One does not contemplate another’s calm possession of a vast sum of money with any great degree of equanimity when one has but a few dingy dollars in the world.

“And suppose this gold-fat fool has his millions,” muttered the young man, as he turned away from the windows. “That is no reason why he should shatter the eardrums of people as they pass about their business.”

“Extree! Eight o’clock! Great fortune!”

Kenyon beckoned the boy, and in a moment he had a paper. Somehow, as he turned and walked toward Thirty-sixth Street, the realization suddenly came to him of how badly off he was; and he scowled at the shadowy future, a sudden, sobering fear at his heart. But this was only for a moment. The man who had stood at the side of Nunez on that last dreadful night in Montevideo was not one to allow a little ill-luck to cast him down; so with chin up and shoulders squared, Kenyon threw the thing from him with 

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