For many a hard year he had been used, by compulsion of desperate circumstance, to counting his two-bit pieces, and now, precisely because all that had passed, he enjoyed sharply the luxury of counting nothing, not even the double-eagles. He laid a yellow-backed bill on the glass counter and received, without regarding it, the change that the now thoroughly deferential clerk deftly returned to him. Doubtless he was paying a heavy commission to the hotel's ticket-agent; perhaps he was obtaining less change than, under the terms of that commission, he was entitled to; but certainly about none of these things did he care. Toil had at last granted him success, toil and good luck; and success had immediately given him the right to emancipation from financial trifling. There are two times in a man's life when no man counts its cost: the time of his serious wooing and that of his ultimate illness. Stainton had come to New York with a twofold purpose; he had come to bury the man that he had been, and he had come to woo. He went to his elaborate rooms to dress. For the last decade and more, he had not worn evening-clothes a score of times, and he now donned the black suit, fresh from a Fifth Avenue tailor's shop, with a care that was in part the result of this scant experience and in part the consequence of a fear of just how ridiculous the new outfit would make him seem. He endangered the shirt when he came to fasten it; he was sure that he had unnecessarily wrinkled the white waistcoat, and the tie occupied his bungling fingers for a full five minutes. His apprehensions, nevertheless, were unjustified. Something, when the toilet was completed, rather like a man of fashion appeared to have been made by the man of the needle out of the man of the pick: if the miner had not wholly vanished, at least the familiar of Broadway had joined him. Stainton, critically surveying himself in the pier-glass and secretly criticising his attitude of criticism, saw nothing that, to his unaccustomed and therefore exacting eye, presented opportunity for objection. The figure was heavier, more stalwart than, as he had been told, was for that season the mode, but the mode, that season, exacted a slimness that indicated the weakling. The clothes themselves were, on the other hand, perfection and to the point of perfection they fitted. The face-- Jim Stainton, with suspended breath, drew the hanging electric-lamp nearer, leaned forward and studied the reflection of that face closely.