“All right,” the child said, entirely satisfied.  “Gee, but I wish Mr. Covington would hurry up!”

Patricia rose obediently and took Riley’s hand, as they left the room.

“Wit ye well,” she said as she bade Allen good-bye at the elevator.  “I shall wait at the window with a silken ladder every night until you come.”

Allen turned slowly back into his room, closed the door, and sat down alone on the window-seat which had so recently also sustained his animated little companion.  Not until now had the full force of the wrench come upon him, and he was conscious of a lump in his throat as he thought of Alice, first always, then of Mr. Gorham, and last of the city itself.  During the months since he had accidentally met Alice in Washington, there had never been a wavering of his purpose.  She was the one girl to him among the many he met during the social rounds into which he had plunged while living in New York.  He had been undaunted by her attitude, undismayed by the seeming hopelessness of it all—­but now her very sympathy proved to him the necessity of at last giving up the one great hope upon which he had set his heart.  The pain at separating from his chief, while of a different nature, was no less keen.  Mr. Gorham still stood to Allen as the epitome of the best that a man could express.  The shock which had come to him when Gorham admitted a knowledge of Covington’s investment of Alice’s money, did not weaken his respect for the man, but rather was the final event to convince him that his own conception of business must be entirely wrong.  If Mr. Gorham sanctioned it, then it was right, it could be nothing else; but all his efforts, conscientious as he knew them to have been, to master the intricacies of the code his preceptor had tried to teach him, had accomplished nothing.

And the great city, which contained so many of his classmates and friends, who had made him welcome in their homes, must in the future receive him only as a stranger.  He loved the individuality of the great towering buildings, the wonderful harbor with its kaleidoscopic shipping, the surging masses of the striving people in the streets, the blinding glare of Broadway at night, and the tense, eager business competition keeping each man, irrespective of position, constantly on his taps to hold his own or to forge ahead against the incoming tide of growing prosperity.  Everything he craved seemed centred here, yet he had been a part of it all, and had failed to keep his grip.  His opportunity had been given him, and he had not taken advantage of it.  The city contained no room for failures—­only those who could force success from its grinding turmoil belonged within its ever-grasping arms.  He must turn his back upon it all, and go to some place less critical, less overpowering, taking with him as memories, in place of triumphs, the thoughts of what might have been.