Tracy was a hero now, and exceedingly popular.  Perhaps nobody had ever been quite so popular on that upper floor before.  But if being discountenanced by these young fellows had been hard to bear, their lavish commendations and approval and hero-worship was harder still to endure.  He felt degraded, but he did not allow himself to analyze the reasons why, too closely.  He was content to satisfy himself with the suggestion that he looked upon himself as degraded by the public spectacle which he had made of himself, fighting on a tin roof, for the delectation of everybody a block or two around.  But he wasn’t entirely satisfied with that explanation of it.  Once he went a little too far and wrote in his diary that his case was worse than that of the prodigal son.  He said the prodigal son merely fed swine, he didn’t have to chum with them.  But he struck that out, and said “All men are equal.  I will not disown my principles.  These men are as good as I am.”

Tracy was become popular on the lower floors also.  Everybody was grateful for Allen’s reduction to the ranks, and for his transformation from a doer of outrages to a mere threatener of them.  The young girls, of whom there were half a dozen, showed many attentions to Tracy, particularly that boarding house pet Hattie, the landlady’s daughter.  She said to him, very sweetly,

“I think you’re ever so nice.”

And when he said, “I’m glad you think so, Miss Hattie,” she said, still more sweetly,

“Don’t call me Miss Hattie—­call me Puss.”

Ah, here was promotion!  He had struck the summit.  There were no higher heights to climb in that boarding house.  His popularity was complete.

In the presence of people, Tracy showed a tranquil outside, but his heart was being eaten out of him by distress and despair.

In a little while he should be out of money, and then what should he do?  He wished, now, that he had borrowed a little more liberally from that stranger’s store.  He found it impossible to sleep.  A single torturing, terrifying thought went racking round and round in his head, wearing a groove in his brain:  What should he do—­What was to become of him?  And along with it began to intrude a something presently which was very like a wish that he had not joined the great and noble ranks of martyrdom, but had stayed at home and been content to be merely an earl and nothing better, with nothing more to do in this world of a useful sort than an earl finds to do.  But he smothered that part of his thought as well as he could; he made every effort to drive it away, and with fair keep it from intruding a little success, but he couldn’t now and then, and when it intruded it came suddenly and nipped him like a bite, a sting, a burn.  He recognized that thought by the peculiar sharpness of its pang.  The others were painful enough, but that one cut to the quick when it calm.  Night after night he lay tossing