“Well, I’m glad he’s coming back, if it’s only to protect us,” she said, while she fastened her fur coat.  “I wonder what he has been doing out West all this time?”

“Makin’ money, I reckon.  They say he makes so much he don’t know what to do with it.”

“We could teach him, couldn’t we?  But he ought to marry and let his wife spend it for him.  Only,” she concluded carelessly, “I suppose he’d select some dizzy chorus girl who would bring him to ruin.  Men of his kind always pick out chorus girls, don’t they?”

“I thought ’twas the other sort that did that,” observed Miss Polly, fresh from the perusal of the Sunday newspapers; “Dukes and society men and the sons of millionaires.”

“Perhaps.  Maybe they’re all alike,” and taking up her umbrella, Gabriella started bravely out into the storm.

At six o’clock, when she struggled back along Twenty-third Street, the wind had changed, and the storm driving furiously down the long blocks caught her in a whirl of blinding snowflakes.  In the swirling whiteness of the distance, the black outlines of the city appeared remote and shadowy, while the waning lights, which shone like dim moons at the crossing, revealed the ghostly figures of a few struggling pedestrians.

The gate was open, and she had almost reached it, when the lurching form of a man, emerging suddenly from the storm, was flung against her with such violence that she fell back for support on the icy railing of the yard.  Then, as the obscure figure, drawing away from her with a staggering motion, began fumbling blindly at the gate, she caught sight of a ghastly face, which looked as if it had been stricken by an incurable illness.  The man wore no overcoat; a knitted muffler was wrapped tightly about his neck; and she saw that the hands fumbling at the gate were red and trembling from cold.

Steadying herself against the fence, she drew her purse from her muff, and she had already taken out a piece of silver, when she heard her name called in a voice which sounded vaguely familiar, though it awoke no immediate associations in her mind.

“Gabriella!  My God!  I was looking for you, Gabriella!”

With the money still in her hand, she stooped to look into his face.

“You don’t know me.  I’m George,” he said in an angry voice as if he were about to burst into tears.  “I’m George, but you don’t know me.”

The storm drove him against her, and he clung weakly to her arm, crying softly in a terrified whimper like a child that is awaking from a horrible nightmare.  Though she did not realize that he was dying, not of disease, but of drink, the thought shot through her mind:  “So this is George.  So this is what George has come to—­George who took everything that he wanted!”

“Where are you going?” she asked, for the shock had restored him to some poor semblance of sanity.

“I was looking for you.  I heard you lived down here, and I knew you’d take me in.  I’ve been ill—­I’m ill enough to die, and they turned me out of the hotel.  There was a woman who stole everything I had.  She stole it and ran off in the night, damn her!”