His helplessness, instead of inspiring her with pity, inflamed her with an unfeeling anger that burst forth in a volume of taunts.

“You ’re the thing I ’ve given up all my chances for—­you, a miserable, drunken jay, without a jay’s decency.  No one had ever looked at you until I picked you up and you ’ve been strutting around ever since, showing off because I was kind to you, and now this is the way you pay me back.  Drunk half the time and half drunk the rest.  Well, you know what I told you the last time you got ‘loaded’?  I mean it too.  You ’re not the only star in sight, see?”

She laughed meanly and began to sing, “You ’ll have to find another baby now.”

For the first time he looked up, and his eyes were full of tears—­tears both of grief and intoxication.  There was an expression of a whipped dog on his face.

“Do’—­Ha’ie, do’—­” he pleaded, stretching out his hands to her.

Her eyes blazed back at him, but she sang on insolently, tauntingly.

The very inanity of the man disgusted her, and on a sudden impulse she sprang up and struck him full in the face with the flat of her hand.  He was too weak to resist the blow, and, tumbling from the chair, fell limply to the floor, where he lay at her feet, alternately weeping aloud and quivering with drunken, hiccoughing sobs.

“Get up!” she cried; “get up and get out o’ here.  You sha’n’t lay around my house.”

He had already begun to fall into a drunken sleep, but she shook him, got him to his feet, and pushed him outside the door.  “Now, go, you drunken dog, and never put your foot inside this house again.”

He stood outside, swaying dizzily upon his feet and looking back with dazed eyes at the door, then he muttered:  “Pu’ me out, wi’ you?  Pu’ me out, damn you!  Well, I ki’ you.  See ’f I don’t;” and he half walked, half fell down the street.

Sadness and Skaggsy were together at the club that night.  Five years had not changed the latter as to wealth or position or inclination, and he was still a frequent visitor at the Banner.  He always came in alone now, for Maudie had gone the way of all the half-world, and reached depths to which Mr. Skaggs’s job prevented him from following her.  However, he mourned truly for his lost companion, and to-night he was in a particularly pensive mood.

Some one was playing rag-time on the piano, and the dancers were wheeling in time to the music.  Skaggsy looked at them regretfully as he sipped his liquor.  It made him think of Maudie.  He sighed and turned away.

“I tell you, Sadness,” he said impulsively, “dancing is the poetry of motion.”

“Yes,” replied Sadness, “and dancing in rag-time is the dialect poetry.”

The reporter did not like this.  It savoured of flippancy, and he was about entering upon a discussion to prove that Sadness had no soul, when Joe, with blood-shot eyes and dishevelled clothes, staggered in and reeled towards them.