The beautifully-dressed tea-drinkers were there now, under the green
glass dome, prattling and smiling, those people he had called his own.
And as the music sounded louder, faster, wilder and wilder with the
gipsy madness--then in that darkening bedchamber his soul became
articulate in a cry of humiliation--

"God in His mercy forgive me, how raw I was!"


A vision came before his closed eyes; the maple-bordered street in
Cranston, the long, straight, wide street where Mary Kramer lived; a
summer twilight; Mary in her white muslin dress on the veranda steps,
and a wistaria vine climbing the post beside her, half-embowering her.
How cool and sweet and good she looked! How dear--and how _kind_!--she
had always been to him.


Dusk stole through the windows: the music ceased and the tea-hour was
over. The carriages were departing, bearing the gay people who went
away laughing, calling last words to one another, and, naturally, quite
unaware that a young man, who, five days before, had adopted them and
called them "his own," was lying in a darkened room above them, and
crying like a child upon his pillow.





X. The Cab at the Corner