has made her bed amongst the starveling First Families, and there she
means to live and die. Five years hence she will have her brood around
her. In ten years she will keep a boarding-house and borrow money. As
her daughters grow up to the stature and grace of their mother, they
will be proud and poor again and breed in and out, until the race will
perish from the earth."

Slow to love, deeply interested, baffled but unsatisfied, Reybold made
up his mind to cut his perplexity short by leaving the city for the
county of Fauquier. As he passed down the avenue late that afternoon,
he turned into E Street, near the theatre, to engage a carriage for
his expedition. It was a street of livery-stables, gambling dens,
drinking houses, and worse; murders had been committed along its
sidewalks. The more pretentious _canaille_ of the city harbored there
to prey on the hotels close at hand and aspire to the chance
acquaintance of gentlemen. As Reybold stood in an archway of this
street, just as the evening shadows deepened above the line of sunset,
he saw something pass which made his heart start to his throat and
fastened him to the spot. Veiled and walking fast, as if escaping
detection or pursuit, the figure of Joyce Basil flitted over the
pavement and disappeared in a door about at the middle of this
Alsatian quarter of the capital.

"What house is that?" he asked of a constable passing by, pointing to
the door she entered.

"Gambling den," answered the officer. "It used to be old Phil
Pendleton's."

Reybold knew the reputation of the house: a resort for the scions of