Jane was ill and did not leave her room during the two days following the visit to the penitentiary. She was haunted by the face of James Bansemer, the convict. It was beyond her powers of imagination to recall him as the well-groomed, distinguished man she once had known. Graydon was deeply distressed over the pain and humiliation he had subjected her to through Droom's unfortunate efforts. The fact that she could not or would not see him for two days hurt him more than he could express, even to himself. The day before he left for New York, however, she saw him in their parlour. She was pale and very quiet.

Neither mentioned the visit to the prison; there was nothing to say.

"You will be in New York next week?" he asked as he arose to leave. His spirit was sore. She again had told him that he must not hope. With an hysterical attempt to lead him on to other topics, she repeated her conversations with Teresa Valesquez, urging him with a hopeless attempt at bravado, to seek out the Spanish girl and marry her. He laughed lifelessly at the jest.

"We will leave Chicago on Monday. Father will have his business affairs arranged by that time. I would not let him resign the presidency. It would seem as if I were taking it away from him. We expect to be in Europe for six or eight months. Then, I am coming back to New York, where I was born, Graydon—to work!"

He went away with the feeling in his heart that he was not to see her again. A single atom of determination lingered in his soul, however, and he tried to build upon it for the future. Rigby's wedding invitation had come to him that morning—almost as a mockery. He tore it to pieces with a scowl of recollection.

Droom's effects were on the way to New York. He hung back, humbly waiting for Graydon to suggest that they should travel East on the same train. His grim, friendless old heart gave a bound of pure joy—the first he had known—when the young man made the suggestion that night.

Together they travelled eastward and homeward, leaving behind them the grey man in stripes.

Jane's six months in Europe grew into a year—and longer. It was a long but a profitable year for Graydon Bansemer; he had been enriched not only in wealth but in the hope of ultimate happiness. Not that Jane encouraged him. Far from it, she was more obdurate than ever with an ocean between them. But his atom of determination had grown to a purpose. His face was thinner and his eyes were of a deeper, more wistful grey; they were full of longing for the girl across the sea, and of pity and yearning for the man back there in the West.

He had toiled hard and well; he had won. The shadow of '99 was still over him, but the year and a new ambition had lessened its blackness. Friends were legion in the great metropolis; he won his way into the hearts and confidence of new associates and renewed fellowship with the old. Invitations came thickly upon him, but he resolutely turned his back upon most of them. He was not socially hungry in these days.

Once a week he wrote to his father, but there never was a reply. He did not expect one, for James Bansemer, in asking him to write, had vowed that his son should never hear from him again until he could speak as a free man and a chastened one. True to his promise, Graydon instituted no movement to secure a pardon. He did, by a strong personal appeal, persuade Denis Harbert to drop further prosecution. There were enough indictments against his father to have kept him behind the bars for life.

Elias Droom had rooms in Eighth Avenue not a great distance from Herald Square. He was quite proud of his new quarters. They had many of the unpleasant features of the old ones in Wells Street, but they were less garish in their affront to an aesthetic eye. The incongruous pictures were there and the oddly assorted books, but the new geraniums had a chance for life in the broader windows; the cook stove was in the rear and there was a venerable Chinaman in charge of it; the bedroom was kept so neat and clean that Droom quite feared to upset it with his person. But, most strange of all, was the change in Droom himself.

"I've retired from active work," he informed Graydon one day, when that young man stared in astonishment at him. "What's the use, my boy, in Elias Droom dressing like a dog of a workingman, when he is a gentleman of leisure and affluence? It surprises you to see me in an evening suit, eh? Well, by Jove, my boy, I've got a dinner jacket, a Prince Albert and a silk hat. There are four new suits of clothes hanging up in that closet," he said, adding, with a sarcastic laugh. "That ought to make a perfect gentleman of me, oughtn't it? What are you laughing at?"

"I can't help it, Elias. Who would have dreamed that you'd go in for good clothes!"

"I used to dream about it, long ago. I swore if I ever got back to New York I'd dress as New Yorkers dress—even if I was a hundred years old. I've got a servant, too. What d'ye think of that? He can't understand a word I say, nor can I understand him. That's why he stays on with me. He doesn't know when I'm discharging him, and I don't know when he's threatening to leave. What do you think of my rooms?"

It was Graydon's first visit to the place, weeks after their return to New York. He had not felt friendly to Droom since the day at the prison; but now he was forgetting his resentment, in the determination to wrest from him the names of Jane's father and mother. He was confident that the old man knew.

"Better than Wells Street, eh? Well, you see, I was in trade then. Different now. I'm getting to be quite a fop. Do you notice that I say 'By Jove' occasionally?" He gave his raucous laugh of derision. "Dined at Sherry's the other night, old chap," he went on with raw mimicry. "They thought I was a Christian and let me in. I used to look like the devil, you know."

"By the Lord Harry, Elias," cried Graydon, "you look like the devil now."

"I've got these carpet slippers on because my shoes hurt my feet," explained Droom sourly. "My collar rubbed my neck, so I took it off. Otherwise, I'm just as I was when I got in at Sherry's. Funny what a difference a little thing like a collar makes, isn't it?"

"I should say so. I never gave it a thought until now. But, Elias, I want to ask a great favour of you. You can—"

"My boy, if your father wouldn't tell you who her parents are, don't expect me to do so. He knows; I only suspect."

"You must be a mind reader," gasped Graydon.

"It isn't hard to read your mind these days. What do you hear from her?" Graydon went back to the subject after a few moments. "I am morally certain that I know who her father and mother were, but it won't do any good to tell her. It didn't make me any better to learn who my father was. It made me wiser, that's all. How's your father?"

After this night Graydon saw the old man often. They dined together occasionally in the small cafes on the West Side. Droom could not, for some reason known only to himself, be induced to go to Sherry's again.

"When Jane comes back, I'll give you both a quiet little supper there after the play maybe. It'll be my treat, my boy."

The old man worked patiently and fruitlessly over his "inventions." They came to naught, but they lightened his otherwise barren existence. There was not a day or night in which his mind was wholly free from thoughts of James Bansemer.

He counted the weeks and days until the man would be free, and his eyes narrowed with these furtive glances into the future. He felt in his heart that James Bansemer would come to him at once, and that the reckoning for his single hour of triumph would be a heavy one to pay. Sometimes he would sit for hours with his eyes staring at the Napoleon above the bookcase, something like dread in their depths. Then again he would laugh with glee, pound the table with his bony hand—much to the consternation of Chang—and exclaim as if addressing a multitude:

"I hope I'll be dead when he gets out of there! I hope I won't live to see him, free again. That would spoil everything. Let me see, I'm seventy-one now; I surely can't live much longer. I want to die seeing him as I saw him that day. The last thing I think of on earth must be James Bansemer's face behind the bars. Ha, ha, ha! It was worth all the years, that one hour! It was even worth while being his slave. I'm not afraid of him! No! That's ridiculous. Of course, I'm not afraid of him. I only want to know he's lying in a cell when I die out here in the great, free world! By my soul, he'll know that a handsome face isn't always the best. He laughed at my face, curse him. His face won her—his good looks! Well, well, well, I only hope she's where she can see his face now!"

He would work himself into a frenzy of torment and glee combined, usually collapsing at the end of his harangue. It disgusted him to think that his health was so good that he might be expected to live beyond the limit of James Bansemer's imprisonment.

At the end of eighteen months, Jane was coming home. She had written to Graydon from London, and the newspapers announced the sailing of the Cables on one of the White Star steamers.

"I am coming home to end all of this idleness," she wrote to him. "I mean to find pleasure in toil, in doing good, in lifting the burdens of those who are helpless. You will see how I can work, Graydon. You will love me more than ever when you see how I can do so much good for my fellow creatures. I want you to love me more and more, because I shall love you to the end of my life."

The night before the ship was to arrive Graydon was dining with the Jack Percivals. There were a dozen in the party—a blase, bored collection of human beings who had dined out so incessantly that eating was a punishment. They had come to look upon food as a foe to comfort and a grievous obstacle in the path of pleasure. Bridge was just beginning to take hold of them; its grip was tightening with new coils as each night went by. Nobody thought of dinner; the thought was of the delay in getting at the game; an instinct that was not even a thought urged them to abhor the food that had come into their lives so abundantly.

Night after night they dined out; night after night they toyed with their forks, ate nothing, drank to hide their yawns, took black coffee and said they enjoyed the food tremendously.

Graydon Bansemer was new to this attitude. He was vigorous and he was not surfeited with food; he had an appetite. Just before six o'clock his host called him up by 'phone, and, in a most genial way, advised him to eat a hearty meal before coming up to dinner. Graydon made the mistake of not following this surprising bit of advice.

He sat next to Mrs. Percival. She appeared agitated and uncertain. Servants came in with the dishes and almost immediately took them away again. No one touched a mouthful of the food; no one except Graydon noticed the celerity with which the plates and their contents were removed; no one felt that he was expected to eat. Graydon, after his first attempt to really eat of the third course, subsided with a look of amazement at his hostess. She smiled and whispered something into his ear. He grew very red and choked with—was it confusion or mirth?

Everybody gulped black coffee and everybody puffed violently at cigars and cigarettes and then everybody bolted for the card tables.

Jack Percival grasped Graydon's arm and drew him back into the dining-room. He was grinning like an ape.

"It worked, by George—worked like a charm. Great Scott, what a money and time saver! I was a little worried about you, Bansemer, but I knew the others wouldn't catch on. Great, wasn't it?"

"What the dickens does it mean?" demanded Graydon. "Mean! Why, good Lord, man, nobody ever eats at these damned dinners. They CAN'T eat. They're sick of dinners. That crowd out there takes tea and things at five or six o'clock. They wouldn't any more think of eating anything at a dinner after the caviar and oysters than you'd think of flying. It's a waste of time and money to give 'em real food. This is the second time I've tried my scheme and it's worked both times. I can serve this same dinner twenty times. Everything's made of wax and papier mache. See what I mean? And I'll leave it to you that there isn't a soul out there who is any the wiser. By George, it's a great invention. I'm going to patent it. Come on; let's get in there. They're howling for us to begin."

Graydon, his mind full of Jane, played at a table with Colonel Sedgwick, a blase old Knickerbocker whose sole occupation in life was saying rude things about other people. To-night he was particularly attentive to his profession. He kept Graydon and the two women sitting straight and uncomfortable in their chairs between hands and positively chilled while the game went on.

Graydon's game was a poor one at best, but he was playing abominably on this occasion. He could not tear his thoughts from the ship that was drawing nearer and nearer to New York harbour with each succeeding minute. In his mind's eye he could look far out over the black waters and see the lonely vessel as it rushed on through the night. He wondered if Jane were asleep or awake and thinking of him.

The Colonel's irascibility finally drove him from the game. He apologised for his wretched playing, but the Colonel did not apologise for the disagreeable things he had said.

It was one o'clock when Graydon reached his rooms. There he found a note from Elias Droom.

"I have an especial reason," he wrote, "for asking you and Miss Cable to dine with me on Monday night. We will go to Sherry's. Let me know as soon as you have seen her."