He felt a lump in his throat, a sense of being blocked at every turn, a horror of doing harm, and a wild pride in the thought that at the last this girl, whom he had rebelled against so often for being without emotion or passion, was at his feet, without reserve, a warm, adoring woman. "Doris, you have got to come to me on my footing," he said firmly at last. She accepted it as the answer she had longed for, raising her face suffused with joy, pressing his hand to her heart, her eyes swimming with tears, inarticulate. "Try me--anything! I'm happy--so happy--so afraid-- I was so afraid-- Oh, Bojo, to think I might never have known you--lost you!" When a little calm had been reestablished, she wished to marry him at once, to live in one room in a boarding-house, if necessary, to prove her sincerity. He answered her evasively, pretending to laugh at her, feeling the while the leaden load of what by a trick of fate he had assumed at the moment when he had expected the completest freedom. Yet there was something so genuine, so uncalculated in her contrition, something so helpless and appealing to his strength in her surrender to his will and decision, that he felt stirred to a poignant pity, and shrank before the brutality of inflicting pain. When he left, quiet and brooding, turning the corner of the Avenue his glance happened to go to a window on the second floor, and he saw Patsie looking down. He stopped, stumbling in his progress, and then, recovering himself, lifted his hat solemnly. She did not move nor make an answering gesture. He saw her only immobile, looking down at him. * * * * * When he returned to the Court and stopped mechanically at the desk for his mail, Della, with her welcoming smile, chided him. "My, but you look awful serious, Mr. Crocker!" "Am I?-- Yes, I suppose so," he said absent-mindedly. He went through into the inner court that yesterday had seemed to him such a constricted little spot in the great city which had responded to his fortunate touch. Now, in the falling dusk, with the lights blossoming out, the court seemed very big, crowded with human beings in the battle of life, and he himself small and without significance. "Well, I've gone and done it," he said to himself with a half laugh. "I wonder--" He wondered, now that it was all over, now that the curtain had dropped on the drama of it, whether after all Drake had been right--whether he was seeing life through his emotions, and what the point of view of thirty-five and forty would be in retrospection. "Well, I've chucked it all," he said, lingering in the quiet and the suffused half lights. "I took the bit in my teeth. There's no turning back now." He remembered his father and the old battling look of defiance in his eyes as he had exhorted his son. "Guess, after all," he said grimly, feeling all at once drawn closer to his own, "I must be a chip of the old block."