“Yes, and where—­you couldn’t call!”

“But I shall know where you are.”

Bedient returned to his rooms, and Miss Mallory resumed her walk....  An hour and a half later, Bedient walked out of the big gate of The Pleiad, and down to the city....  For the first time in several days, Celestino Rey breathed long.  Assassination was only one of the things he had feared....

Forty-eight unavailing hours passed in Treasure Island Inn.  This night would bring an end to the mysterious four days.  Bedient was at bay before the remnant of what had been and hoped.  To his own eyes, he was an abject failure now, even in these physical affairs—­he who had dared to arraign New York workers in almost every aspect of their life!  The last beacon of his spirit was blown out in the storm; his mind had long since preyed upon itself, the pith gone from it, through drifting in dark dream-tides; and now he who had been trained from a boy to physical actions weakly succumbed before the old Spaniard’s will and strategy.  Yet he could not find it within him greatly to care.

Treasure Island Inn had interested him at first, not so much through its exterior contrast to The Pleiad (which was complete enough for any city to furnish), but because its wretchedness in the sense of money-lack was less than in its moral poverty.  Its evils were so open and self-reviling; its passages so angular, so suggestive of blood-drip and brooding horror; its rooms so peeled, meagre and creaking—­depravity so sincere.  Crime certainly had not been spared around the world to furnish its living actors for Treasure Island Inn.  All the ragtag was there—­not a lust nor a mannerism missing.

And now that life had cast him into this place, Bedient found himself utterly unable to contend with the squalor of fact and mind; indeed, he was quite as ineffectual as he had been in the midst of the glittering deviltry of The Pleiad....  Abased before realities; lost to the meaning of every excellence of his life-training; shattered by psychic revolts; his brain reflecting the strange mirages and singing the vague nothings of starvation—­but enumeration only dulls the picture!  In every plane of his nature, he was close to the end, forty-eight hours after his arrival at the Inn of the lower city.

Certain things had become mature, irrevocable:  That he was a superfluous type in this Western world of his birth; that Beth Truba had left the highway, where pass the women of earth, to enter his most intimate environs and possess him entirely; that passing on, she had left but the stuff of death.  The time had been when he would have depreciated in another man the utter weakness into which he had fallen.