A paroxysm of pain distorted his companion’s face and his head flinched back as though it had been heavily struck.

“God! yes, like a strangling man wants breath,” he said.

It was a misery for which there was no aid, so Thayre satisfied himself with the inquiry:  “What is this thing you want me to do?”

“Just intimate to these men that they stop asking those questions, that’s all.”

“Is there any one you particularly blame?”

Haswell shook his head.  “No.  There was at first, but the principal point is that she has decided she can’t be happy with me.  If I try to hold her after knowing that I become her jailer.  I treat her as my property.  I hope I’m not that sort.  I had my chance and have failed.”

“I say, I don’t want to be impertinent, you know.”  Thayre bent forward and spoke earnestly.  “There are things a man doesn’t like to have put up to him.  But you aren’t letting this knock you off your line, are you?  You aren’t going to let it bowl you over?”

Again the tall man shook his head.  “No, I’m quite all right,” he said.  “I’m going fairly straight—­so far.”

Late that night a wet snow was falling and Madison square was almost deserted.  Here and there in the Metropolitan and Flatiron buildings shone an isolated and belated window light.  At the Garden a Wild West show with rings and side performances had long ago disgorged its crowds and quieted its pandemonium of brass bands.  Len Haswell had been walking with the aimlessness of insomnia, and asking himself over and over one question:  “What changed it all?” In answer he accused himself and argued the case for the woman without whom he was too lonely to go home and face an empty house.

It was after one o’clock and the saloon doors were barred, but as he passed a small place not far from the square, he saw a side door flap, and he entered it.  It was an unprepossessing door, outwardly labeled, “ladies’ entrance.”

Haswell called for whiskey, and was served by a waiter in a spotted apron, whose dank hair fell over a sallow and oily face.  Save for himself, there were only four other customers.  In a corner partition a slovenly woman in bedraggled finery berated the man who sat with bloated eyes across from her.  The waiter looked on sardonically.  At another table were two derelicts from one of the Garden side shows.  A truculent and beady-eyed dwarf whose face hardly showed above the boards was brow-beating a cringing giant of unbelievable immensity.  “You crabbed my act, you big stiff,” shrilled the midget truculently—­and his huge vis-a-vis fell into a volume of excuse and apology.

Haswell set down his glass half-empty.  “No good,” he muttered as he rose and went out again into the streets.  “One can’t be alone.”  Yet he felt very much alone.

* * * * *