Then he turned his chair with its back to the room and looked out and the stubborn pride died in his eyes and his face grew old and pathetic. There was no further room for doubt. He was tasting ostracism and being included in this wave of hatred for his son, which he had regarded as newspaper rubbish. He leaned forward with his gloved hands on his cane and once or twice under his fastidiously trimmed beard, his lips twitched painfully. Finally he rose, ordering his next cocktail over a hotel bar, and though the stubbornness of pride forced him back on the morrow to lunch at his accustomed club table, he lunched alone, and was grateful for the solicitous courtesy of the negro who served him. * * * * * One afternoon Paul made his way down Fifth avenue on foot. The sky was unbelievably blue and a flashing brilliancy sparkled in all the splinters of color that embroidered themselves along the parquetry of the street. The avenue has, at times, a magic of its own and today it was a swiftly flowing stream of brilliancy and life and laughter. But this was a mood to which Paul Burton found no response. His heart was attuned to echoes of a more somber tone--and he was bound on a mission which was, for him, a bold one. He was disobeying orders which until now he had not ventured to disobey. Marcia Terroll had banished him from her presence. Since that day in her apartment he had seen less of her than before and for many weeks now nothing at all. Marcia, unlike Loraine Haswell, recognized that they could not meet without dangerous drifting, and that such drifting could end only in disaster, so at last she had forbidden his visiting her even occasionally and to all his arguments she had steadfastly shaken her head with gentle obduracy. For a time they had met as they might have met had the interview in her apartment on the drizzly afternoon never occurred. She had torn that page out of their chronicles of acquaintanceship, and assumed that it had never been included. Her wit had sparkled for him and her individual charm had blossomed as though her life had never known a season other than spring and blossom-time. Sometimes he found himself wondering if that afternoon had been actual. He discovered himself using quaint phrases of her invention as part of his own conversational equipment, and often he found himself applauded for some flash of repartee which he knew was only a quotation from her. But also he found himself incapable of that continuous self-restraint which she required of him under their agreement of a future basis. He had his moments when he could no more avoid feeling and acting and declaring himself her lover than he could avoid later regretting them, and, for this inability, he had been exiled.