any other reason whatever but for what you are?'"

"'It has killed me,' he groaned."

"She glanced complacently down at her softly glistening shoulders."

"'Father . . . I have asked you not to interfere between Fred and me.'"

"Evidently she had been crying."

"At Josephine's right sat a handsome young foreigner."




THE GRAIN OF DUST




I


Into the offices of Lockyer, Sanders, Benchley, Lockyer & Norman,
corporation lawyers, there drifted on a December afternoon a girl in
search of work at stenography and typewriting. The firm was about the
most important and most famous--radical orators often said infamous--in
New York. The girl seemed, at a glance, about as unimportant and obscure
an atom as the city hid in its vast ferment. She was blonde--tawny hair,
fair skin, blue eyes. Aside from this hardly conclusive mark of identity