For two years he had silently adored Miss Peek, worshipping her from
a spiritual distance through which her attractions took on stellar
brightness and mystery. Mrs. Peek kept a few choice boarders, among
whom was Tansey. The other young men romped with Katie, chased her
with crickets in their fingers, and "jollied" her with an irreverent
freedom that turned Tansey's heart into cold lead in his bosom.
The signs of his adoration were few--a tremulous "Good morning,"
stealthy glances at her during meals, and occasionally (Oh,
rapture!) a blushing, delirious game of cribbage with her in the
parlour on some rare evening when a miraculous lack of engagement
kept her at home. Kiss him in the hall! Aye, he feared it, but it
was an ecstatic fear such as Elijah must have felt when the chariot
lifted him into the unknown.

But to-night the gibes of his associates had stung him to a feeling
of forward, lawless mutiny; a defiant, challenging, atavistic
recklessness. Spirit of corsair, adventurer, lover, poet,
bohemian, possessed him. The stars he saw above him seemed no more
unattainable, no less high, than the favour of Miss Peek or the
fearsome sweetness of her delectable lips. His fate seemed to him
strangely dramatic and pathetic, and to call for a solace consonant
with its extremity. A saloon was near by, and to this he flitted,
calling for absinthe--beyond doubt the drink most adequate to his
mood--the tipple of the roué, the abandoned, the vainly sighing
lover.

Once he drank of it, and again, and then again until he felt a
strange, exalted sense of non-participation in worldly affairs
pervade him. Tansey was no drinker; his consumption of three