disappeared from view.

Slowly he drew from his pocket an envelope which had been addressed and
stamped for mailing, and very carefully tore it into small bits which he
dropped into the gutter. He could not have told had any one asked him
what prompted him to the act. A girl had come into his life for an
instant, and had gone out again, doubtless forever, and yet in that
instant Jimmy Torrance had taken a new grasp upon his self-esteem.

It might have been the girl, and again it might not have been. He could
not tell. Possibly it was the simple little act of refusing the tip she
had proffered him. It might have been any one of a dozen little
different things, or an accumulation of them all, that had brought back
a sudden flood of the old self-confidence and optimism.

"To-morrow," said Jimmy as he climbed into his bed, "I am going to land
a job."

And he did. In the department store to the general managership of whose
mail-order department he had aspired Jimmy secured a position in the
hosiery department at ten dollars a week. The department buyer who had
interviewed him asked him what experience he had had with ladies'
hosiery.

"About four or five years," replied Jimmy.

"For whom did you work?"

"I was in business for myself," replied the applicant, "both in the West
and in the East. I got my first experience in a small town in Nebraska,