Had there been a friend to whom he could turn during these days he might have been spared some of the hours of anguish he endured, but his pride was cut to the quick, and he shrank from seeing any one who knew him or his family. Cropsie Decker could have helped him, but Cropsie was in Mexico. To Noah Wicker he had ceased to be an individual, he had become a client, a first client, and personalities were swamped in abstractions. The only place where he could have found sympathy and understanding was at Thornwood, the hospitable door of which he had resolutely closed with his own hand. If he thought the depths of loneliness had been sounded out there in the Orient, he had now to learn that it is only in one's own country, among one's own people, that the plummet strikes bottom. The day before the case was to be presented Noah came up from the city, and once again they went over every tiresome, familiar detail. By the time evening arrived Donald was in a state of black dejection. Half a dozen sleepless nights, and the return of several articles did not tend to brighten the situation, and when Noah accepted an invitation from the Judge to dine with him, Donald felt that he had been abandoned to his fate. Twilight was closing in, the kind that has no beginning and no end, a damp, gray saturating twilight that smothers the soul in a fog of gloom and relaxes all the moral fibers. Donald went to his small window and looked out. The street below was deserted, save for an occasional shabby surrey, splashing through the mud on its way to the station. At long intervals an umbrella bobbed past, and once a drove of cattle lumbered by, driven by a boy astride a mule. Donald jerked down the shade savagely, and lit the single gas-jet. In a magazine which he picked up was a graphic article on child labor in the mines, giving pictures of ragged, emaciated children who spent their lives underground, breathing foul air and becoming dwarfed in body and soul. He flung the book from him and dropped his head upon his arms. Life seemed a great, inexorable machine, setting at naught human aspiration, human endeavor. What was the good of fighting it? What was the sense in believing in a divine order, in such infernal chaos? Unable to stand his own company any longer, he seized his hat and started for the hotel. He was in a reckless, hopeless mood, ready to take diversion wherever he found it, and as is usual in such cases, diversion met him half way. The little hotel office was in a spasm of activity, bells were ringing, doors slamming, and guests arriving. The group of loiterers who usually sat facing the fire, criticizing the daily proceedings of the legislature, now stood in a semicircle with their backs to it, watching the new arrivals. “It's a theatrical company,” explained one of the voluble crowd to Donald; “the liveliest lay-out we've had for moons. That's the star talking to the fellow in the checked suit. Some winner, isn't she?”