high secrets of his soul to coarsefibred woman. He turned away,
darkly conscious of having magnanimously given Ada a chance to mount
with him into the upper air, which opportunity she, daughter of
earth, had, in her purblind manner, refused. Thenceforward Ada was
to him an unnoticeable item in the cosmos.

One hopeless month succeeded another, until a cloud seemed to close
round Paul's brain, rendering him automatic in his actions, merely
animal in his half-satisfied appetites. Fines and curses were his
portion at the factory; curses and beatings--deserved if Justice
held a hurried scale at home. Paul, who had read of suicide in The
Bludston Herald, turned his thoughts morbidly to death. But his
dramatic imagination always carried him beyond' his own demise to
the scene in the household when his waxlike corpse should be
discovered dangling from a rope fixed to the hook in the kitchen
ceiling. He posed cadaverous before a shocked Budge Street, before a
conscience-stricken factory; and he wept on his sack bed in the
scullery because the prince and the princess, his august parents,
would never know that he had died. A whit less gloomy were his
imaginings of the said prince and princess rushing into the house,
in the nick of time, just before life was extinct, and cutting him
down. How they were to find him he did not know. This side-track
exploration of possibilities was a symptom of sanity.

Yet, Heaven knows what would have happened to Paul, after a year or
so at the factory, if Barney Bill, a grotesque god from the wide and
breezy spaces of the world, had not limped into his life.

Barney Bill wore the cloth cap and conventional and unpicturesque,
though shapeless and weather-stained, garment of the late nineteenth