So the year moved quickly on. Its tasks were countless. It had another child to teach another message. There was a little girl in the town--a small girl with the bluest eyes in the world and tiny curls--yellow curls that wound so softly around her mother's fingers that you would think that they were not curls at all but golden dreams of curls that had for the moment come true and would fade back into fairyland whence they came. And the passing year had to prop the child at a window while the dusk came creeping into the quiet house. There she sat waiting, watching, hoping that the proud, handsome man who came at twilight down the way leading to the threshold, would smile at her. She was not old enough to hope he would take her in his arms where she could cuddle and be loved. So the passing year had to take a fine brush and paint upon the small, wistful face a fleeting shadow, the mere ghost of a sadness that came and went as she watched and waited for the father love. And Judge Thomas Van Dorn, the punctilious, gay, resistless, young Tom Van Dorn was deaf to the deeper voices that called to him and beckoned him to rest his soul. And soon upon the winds that roam the world and carry earth dreams back to ghosts, and bring ghosts of what we would be back to our dreams--the roaming winds bore away the passing year, but they could not take the shadows that it left upon the child's tender heart. Now, when the old year with all its work lay down in the innumerable company of its predecessors, and the bells rang and the whistles blew in South Harvey to welcome in the new year, the midnight sky was blazoned with the great torches from the smelter chimneys, and the pumps in the oil wells kept up their dolorous whining and complaining, like great insects battening upon an abandoned world. In South Harvey the lights of the saloons and the side of the dragon's spawn glowed and beckoned men to death. Money tinkled over the bars, and whispered as it was crumpled in the claws of the dragon. For money the scurrying human ants hurried along the dark, half-lighted streets from the ant hills over the mines. For money the cranes of the pumps creaked their monody. For money the half-naked men toiled to their death in the fumes of the smelter. So the New Year's bells rang a pean of welcome to the money that the New Year would bring with its toll of death. "Money," clanged the church bells in the town on the hill. "Money makes wealth and since we have banished our kings and stoned our priests, money is the only thing in our material world that will bring power and power brings pleasure and pleasure brings death." "And death? and death? and death?" tolled the church bells that glad New Year, and then ceased in circling waves of sound that enveloped the world, still inquiring--"and death? and death?" fainter and fainter until dawn.