Marcia Terroll came back to town for a brief stay between engagements and stopped with Dorothy Melliss at their old rooms.  She had not dared to ask any question about Paul, and the other girl would have refrained from volunteering information had she possessed it.  Indeed, it would have been unlikely that Dorothy would know anything of the submerged Burtons in this city where lives may run out parallel spans almost door to door, and never touch.  But one evening as Marcia was crossing the square, just after the lights began to glow, a human derelict sidled up to her and accosted her with a mumbled petition for alms.  The man was old and his clothes though neatly patched were threadbare and worn.  His face, too, was seamed and his breath was alcoholic.

“Madam,” he said in a low voice as he fell into step with her, “I was not always so unfortunate, nor am I responsible for my adversities.  Could you—­”

With a shudder of disgust Marcia quickened her pace, and the man, fearful of the eye of police authority, dropped back.  But Miss Terroll could never bring herself without a struggle to ignore the plea of old age.  It struck her, too, that despite his panhandler’s manner this man was yet in a fashion different.

There was evidently someone who sought to keep him neatly mended up, for her woman’s eye had caught that detail in a glance.  Through his inebriety lurked a ghost-like suggestion of past gentility.  She turned impulsively back, beckoning to him as she searched her purse.  In it were two quarters and one of them she gave him.

“God bless you, madam,” he began with a grotesque echo of the ancient pompousness.  “God knows I had never anticipated such a necessity.”

As she hurried on, he removed his hat and bowed with an attempt at stateliness which held a pathos of burlesque.

Marcia Terroll was spared the hurt of knowing that the panhandler with whom she had divided the contents of her pocketbook, and whom she had thus enabled to buy five greatly desired glasses of beer, was the father of the man she loved.

So, though Mary Burton did not know it, this was the way old Tom eked out the very scant pin-money she could spare him for his own method of drugging his sorrows.

CHAPTER XXXII

An old year was dying and a young year was about to be born.  Along the blazing stretch of Broadway from Thirtieth street to Columbus circle seethed and sounded the noisy saturnalia of New Year’s Eve.

The street that never sleeps was tonight a human spill-way, churning in freshet.  Between its walls went up the clamor of human throats raised in talk, in shouts, in song, in laughter and in contest with the blaring of toy horns, the racket of rattlers and all those discordances that seek to swell pandemonium to the bursting of ear-drums.  Theaters were disgorging their “big-night” audiences and pedestrians moved in a congested mass which battalions of traffic officers herded slowly as dogs herd crowded sheep.