For weeks Winn lived an aimless life without occupation, which to him meant misery. He walked the streets to be jostled by people in a hurry, and wished that he also was. He looked into shop windows where dummies stood clad in beautiful garments, and wondered how Mona would look if robed in such. He met people hurrying home from their work at night and almost envied them. In his club he felt so ill at ease that games, conversation, and even the raillery of Jack Nickerson bored him. He had a pleasant home, where his aunt always thought of his comfort; he escorted her to church with regularity; read the daily papers; called on Ethel occasionally, to find her always the same sweet temptation. She neither allured nor repelled, but was always the same piquant and yet sympathetic friend, well poised and sensible, who judged all men and spoke of them as a mixture of nobility and selfish conceit in unequal parts, with the latter predominating. To Winn she sometimes talked as though he were still a big boy who needed guidance, and then again as if he were more than mortal and out of place in a bad world.

"You are discontented," she said to him one evening, "and out of your sphere among the city men. You take right and wrong too seriously and are like an eagle caged with jackdaws. City men are such in the main, thinking more about the cut of their coats, the fit of their linen, and color of their ties than of aught else. You are as unlike them as when you came here a big boy with countryisms clinging to you and the scent of new mown hay perfuming your impulses; you were always out of place here, and the three months on that island has made you more so."

It was a truthful and yet somewhat flattering portrayal of Winn as he really did seem to her, but it only added to his discontent.

"What you say may be true enough," he answered, "but what shall I do? I can't go into an office again and be content, the taste of being my own master on the island has spoiled me for that. I would go into some business if only I had the capital, but I haven't; and I wouldn't ask my aunt to loan me any, even under the existing circumstances."

"I wish I could advise you," she replied in the sympathetic tone so easily at her command. "I certainly would if I could. But whatever you do, don't go into the stock gambling. I respect you now, and I might not then."

The time came when she wished that she had refrained from that expression.

But a different trend of advice came to Winn later from Jack Nickerson.

"Why don't you open a bucket shop, my boy," said that cynic, "and make some money? I'll back you for a few thousand to start, since you were foolish enough to part with all Page made for you out of the Rockhaven flurry, and it's a dead sure thing. Then again you have won quite a little notoriety out of this Weston & Hill fiasco, and men on the street say you have a cool, level head. I tell you, open up one of those joints and let these smart Alecs who want to get rich quick come in and lose their money. If you keep moping around another month you will go daft, or fall in love with Ethel Sherman over again, which means the same. I hear you are a frequent caller there."

"I've got to spend my time somewhere," answered Winn, rather doggedly, "and Ethel's good company."

Jack eyed him curiously.

"How the moth will flutter around the candle," he said.

"I'm in no danger there," asserted Winn, "so don't worry. Once bit, twice shy; and as for the bucket shop, I'll have none of it. I'd as soon open a faro bank."

"And why not?" queried Jack. "All the world loves to gamble, and most of them do in one way or another. Even the good people who pray can't resist grab bags and fish ponds, and until a few ultra prudes guessed it was gambling, they were all the rage at church fairs. Even now, in society of the best, bridge whist and whist for prizes, afternoon and evening, flourishes on all sides. Oh, it's gamble, my boy, go where you will; and you might as well take a hand in it and make money."

"But a bucket shop is disreputable," replied Winn, "or has that reputation, and on par with gambling dens in fact, though protected by law. It is worse than those in one way, for men who go in feel forced to put up margins to save themselves, and in the end go broke. Look at the embezzlements that crop out almost daily, and nine out of ten traceable to a bucket shop. The law ought to force them to put up a sign, 'All ye who enter here will lose.'"

"You have matured rapidly since you came from the island, my boy," laughed Nickerson, "and now you are fit to do business. Put your new scruples in your pocket and join the crowd. Only those who make money are considered anybody. And how they make it matters little. Make it you must, or walk in this world; and those who walk, get kicked."

And Winn, conscious that a bitter truth lurked in his friend's words, went his way more disconsolate than ever.

But the memory of Rockhaven was still strong in him, and the eyes of Mona and the heart-burst that marked their parting an ever present memory.

And no answer had yet come to his letter.

One evening a little later, when a November storm, half rain, half sleet, made the street miserable, Winn was pushing his way homeward when he saw a girl, poorly clad, a thin summer wrap her only extra garment, looking wistfully into a store window where tropical fruits tempted the passers. He recognized her at once as the stenographer who had served Weston & Hill.

"Why, Mamie," he said, halting, "how are you and what are you doing here in the storm?"

"I was just wishing I could afford a basket of grapes for mother," she answered, smiling at the sight of a friendly face, "but I can't. I've been out of work now since the firm failed, you see."

"I've wondered what became of you," said Winn, his sympathy aroused at once, "and how you were getting on. Where are you working now?"

"Nowhere," she answered. "I've been looking for a place for two months and can't find one. Mother gave the firm all her money to invest, and it's gone, and she is very ill. I am completely discouraged."

Then once more a righteous curse aimed at Weston almost escaped Winn's lips.

"I am very sorry for you, Mamie," he said, "and I wish I could help you."

"If you could only find me a place," she replied eagerly, catching at the straw of hope, "I should be so grateful. We are very poor now."

"I'll do what I can for you," he said kindly, "and maybe I can help you. I, too, was left stranded by that thief Weston;" and without another word he stepped inside the store and, buying a good supply of fruit, joined the girl outside.

"I am going home with you, Mamie," he said cheerfully, "and take your mother some grapes. I've an idea of writing up a history of the Weston & Hill swindle, and I want her story."

It was the first time he had thought of it, but it served as a ready excuse. Then with one hand and arm loaded with bundles, and linking the other around the shivering girl's as if she were a child, the two started toward her home.

"We have had to move," said the girl, as she directed their way toward the poorer quarters of the city, "and I am ashamed to take you to my home. We have only two rooms now."

"Oh, you mustn't mind me," answered Winn, briskly. "I am a fellow-sufferer with you now, you know."

When her home was reached in a narrow side street and up three flights of stairs at that, poverty and a woman coughing her life away beside the kitchen stove told the tale. Winn noticed that the supper awaiting the girl was of bread, butter, and tea only.

"It was very kind of you to come, Mr. Hardy," said the mother, in an almost tearful voice, when he was introduced; "and if you can find a place for Mamie, it will help us very much."

And then she told her story.

It need not be repeated—its counterpart may be found by the score in any city where legalized thieving like Weston's scheme ever dupes the credulous, and is as common as the annals of simple drunks. To Winn it was new, for he had no idea his former employer could be so vile as to induce a poor widow to invest her all to meet inevitable loss.

And be it said here, that if the world at large could realize how many sharks are ready to prey upon them with the tempting bait of countless schemes, promising sure and rich returns, big interest for their money, guarantees of all kinds (on paper), and flanked by long lists of names, they would look at "farm-mortgage bonds," "gold-mining stocks," "oil stocks," "cumulative gold-bearing bonds," and the whole list of traps set for the unwary, as so many financial perils.

And be it said also, that if the securities held as collateral by half the banks could be scrutinized, and the foundations they rested upon understood by all the confiding depositors in these banks, a panic would ensue that would sweep this land of credulity like a typhoon.

Winn Hardy, who by sheer good luck had saved his aunt's fortune, listening to this poor widow's tearful recital of her woes, gnashed his teeth at the departed J. Malcolm Weston and vowed that he would show him up in the press.

When he bade good-by to the girl and her mother, promising to look out for a place for the former, he stopped on his way home at a market and paid for an ample supply of necessaries to be sent them on the morrow. More than that, he went to Page and, telling the tale, insisted that he give the girl a chance to earn a livelihood.

And to no one, not even his aunt, did he tell what he had done.