“Walter!” she called after him, and again, “Walter!  Don’t go!”

But he was running top speed down the footpath.

When he stopped, from growing weariness of soul as much as from physical exhaustion, he was on a cross street leading into Sixth Avenue.  The tinsel front of a saloon rose before him.  He tore through the swinging doors, ordered a drink of whiskey and then another.  It might have been so much water, for all it either fed or quenched the fire within him.  With some instinct to go back to his own private hole of misery, he took a street car.  But he found it impossible to sit still.  He got down after three blocks, found another saloon, took another drink.  This, too, evaporated in the feverish heat engendered by his sleepless night.  But it did afford an idea, a plan.  He would get drunk—­for the first time in his life, get blind, staggering drunk.  When he recovered from that, time would have dimmed the misery a little; he would be able to endure.  Just now, he must get drunk or die.

Alone and in broad daylight, he tried it.  From, the corner saloons of the Upper West Side to the dives of the Bowery, he poured in whiskey and yet more whiskey.  Nothing happened; positively nothing.  The fire within burned as fiercely as ever, the misery beat as keenly against his temples.  He tried his voice; he was speaking clearly.  Once he ran down the open asphalt of a water-front street; all his muscular control remained.  The most that liquor did was to spread a slight fog over his senses, so that he seemed to be seeing through a veil, hearing through a partition.

On the approach of night, the effect struck him all at once.  It came in a wave of drowsiness, a delicious sense that his trouble, still there, weighed lightly upon him—­did not matter.  He was sitting in Madison Square when he realized this effect.  He could sleep now.  Thank God for that!  He turned toward the club, walking on the rosy airs of reaction.

As he approached the club door, he was aware that a woman had disengaged herself from the crowd across the street, was hurrying toward him.  At that moment, a hall-boy dived from the entrance, and grabbed his arm urgently but respectfully.

“That woman’s been asking for you since four—­when we chased her away she laid for you—­if you want to get inside—­”

“Young man,” said the voice of Rosalie Le Grange across his shoulder, “young man, Dr. Blake wants to see me as much as I want to see him an’ more.  Now you jest leave go of him, and you Dr. Blake, come right along with me, or I’ll make a scene and scandal right here in front of the club.”

The hall-boy, with the exaggerated desire to avoid scandal which marks the perfect club servant, fell away.  As for Dr. Blake, this seemed the line of least resistance.  Life and death, misery and happiness—­all looked equally dim and rosy.

Mme. Le Grange said nothing until they were three doors away.  Under the marquee of a restaurant, she stopped, whirled Blake, whom she still held by an arm, within the entrance.