He shut the door, and started down the stairway; and he straightway forgot Smith in the returning tide of his own difficulties. He saw clearly that there was no longer any hope; his plans were wrecked past mending. Persuading Miss Carstairs to keep her engagement to-morrow, his one great problem this morning, had become an unimportant detail now. Charlie Hammerton, with his merciless knowledge, filled the whole horizon like a menacing mirage. It would not be enough to close the boy's month till after the luncheon and then let it open to babble. For Elbert Carstairs had flatly drawn the line at a yellow aftermath of sensation. He would count a tall-typed scandal the day after to-morrow, when his daughter was with him, fully as bad as the same affliction now. And, the newspaper finally lost to them, there was no conceivable way in which that scandal could be averted now. But about the moment when his foot hit the bottom of the worn stairs, the door at the head of them burst open, and a curiously stirred voice, which he had some difficulty in recognizing as Smith's, called his name. "Varney! oh, Varney! I--really meant to tell you--and then I forgot." He turned and saw the editor's pale face hanging over the banisters. "It was Maginnis I sold the _Gazette_ to, you know--Peter Maginnis. I wouldn't have sold it to anybody else. You'll find him at the hotel eating supper." Varney, looking at him, knew then what it was that Smith thought he owed to him and Maginnis. He went back up the stairs and the two men shook hands in rather an agitated silence. CHAPTER XIV CONFERENCE BETWEEN MR. HACKLEY, THE DOG MAN, AND MR. RYAN, THE BOSS At half past six o'clock, or thereabouts, James Hackley dragged slowly up Main Street. He was garbed in his working suit of denim blue, trimmed with monkey wrench and chisel, and he wore, further, an air of exaggerated fatigue. A rounded protuberance upon his cheek indicated that the exhilaration of the quid was not wanting to his inner man, but the solace he drew from it appeared pitifully trifling. Now and then he would pause, rest his person against a lamp-post, or the front of some emporium, and shake his head despondently, like one most fearful of the consequences of certain matters. Since four o'clock that afternoon, in fact, Mr. Hackley had been out upon a reluctant stint of lawn-mowing, reluctant because he hated all work with a Titanic hatred and sedulously cultivated the conviction that his was a delicate health. In view of the magnificent windfall in connection with the killing of his dog, it had not been his design to accept any more retainers for a long time to come. That occurrence had lifted him, as by the ears, from the proletariat into the capitalistic leisure class; and the map of the world had become but the portrait of his oyster.