the image of the saloon and all its inmates by conjuring up a vision of
the world he had left, the winsome young cosmopolitan Paris of the art
student. The streets, the cafes, the studios; his few men, his many
women, friends--Adolph Jensen, the kindly Swede who loved him; Louise,
Nanette, the little Polish Yanina, who had said they loved him; the
slanting-glanced Turkish students, the grave Syrians, the democratic
un-British Londoners--the smell, the glamour of Paris, returned to him
with the nostalgia of despair.

These he had left. To what did he go?




II


In his shivering, creaking little cabin, suspended, as it were, by the
uncertain waters between two lives, Byrd forced himself to remember the
America he had known before his Paris days. He recalled his birthplace
--a village in upper Michigan--and his mental eyes bored across the
pictures that came with the running speed of a cinematograph to his
memory.

The place was a village, but it called itself a city. The last he had
seen of it was the "depot," a wooden shed surrounded by a waste of rutted
snow, and backed by grimy coal yards. He could see the broken shades of
the town's one hotel, which faced the tracks, drooping across their dirty
windows, and the lopsided sign which proclaimed from the porch roof in
faded gilt on black the name of "C. E. Trench, Prop." He could see the