He saw her, of course--Dyketon was a small place then; it was afterwards that it grew into a city--but always at a distance, always across the wide gulf that little-town etiquette digs for encounters in public between the godly and the ungodly. Once in a while she would pass him on the street, she usually riding in a hack and he usually afoot, with no sign of recognition, of course, on the part of either. Then again, some evening at the theater, he, sitting with his wife down-stairs, would happen to glance up toward the "white" gallery and she would be perched, as one of a line of her sisters of transgression, on the front row there. The Dyketon theater management practiced the principle of segregation for prostitutes just as the city government practically enforced it in the matter of their set-apart living-quarters. These communal taboos were as old as the community itself was. Probably they still endure. With time, even the occasional sight of his old light-o'-love failed to revive in his mind pictures of the house where he once had knowledge of her. The memories of that interior faded into a conglomerate blur. One memory did persist. Long after the rest was a faint jumble he recalled quite sharply the landlady's two pets--her asthmatic pug-dog with its broody cocked eyes, and her wicked talking parrot with its yellow head and its vice for gnawing woodwork and its favorite shrieked refrain: "Ladies, gent'men in the parlor!" He remembered them long after he forgot how the place had smelled of bottled beer and cheap perfumery and unaired sofa-stuffing; and how always on the lower floor there had prevailed in daytime a sort of dusky gloom by reason of the shutters being tightly closed and barred fast against sunlight and small boys or other Peeping Toms who might come venturing on forbidden ground; and how, night-times, above the piano-playing of the resident "professor" and the clamor of many voices there would cut through the shrill squeals of an artificial joy--the laughter forced from the sorry souls of those forlorn practitioners at the oldest and the very saddest of human trades. * * * * *