The day was of young June, though grey and a little chill with the
discouraged spirit of a retarded season. Though the hegira of the
well-to-do to their summer homes had long since set in, still there
remained in the city sufficient of their class to keep the Avenue
populous from Twenty-third Street north to the Plaza in the evening
hours. The suggestion of wealth, or luxury, of money's illimitable
power, pervaded the atmosphere intensely, an ineluctable influence, to
an independent man heady, to Duncan maddening. He surveyed the parade
with mutiny in his heart. All this he had known, a part of it had
been--upon a time. Now ... the shafts of his roving eyes here and there
detected faces recognisable, of men and women whose acquaintance he had
once owned. None recognised him who stood there worn, shabby and tired.
He even caught the direct glance of a girl who once had thought him
worth winning, who had set herself to stir his heart and--had been
successful. To-day she looked him straight in the eyes, apparently,
with undisturbed serenity, then as calmly looked over and through and
beyond him. Her limousine hurried her on, enthroned impregnably above
the envious herd.

He sped her transit with a mirthless chuckle. "You're right," he said,
"dead right. You simply don't know me any more, my dear--you musn't;
you can't afford to any more than I could afford to know you."

None the less the fugitive incident seemed to brim his disconsolate
cup. In complete dejection of mind and spirit he pushed on to Kellogg's
quarters, buoyed by a single hope--that Kellogg might be out of town or
delayed at his office.

In that event Duncan might have a chance to gather up his belongings