When Lyman Gage set sail for France three years before, he left behind him a modest interest in a promising business enterprise, a girl who seemed to love him dearly, and a debt of several thousand dollars to her father, who had advised him to go into the enterprise and furnished the funds for his share in the capital. When he had returned from France three days before, he had been met with news that the business enterprise had gone to smash during the war, the girl had become engaged to a dashing young captain with a well-feathered nest, and the debt had become a galling yoke. “Father says, tell you you need not worry about the money you owe him,” wrote the girl sweetly, concluding her revelations. “You can pay it at your leisure when you get started again.” Lyman Gage lost no time in gathering together every cent he could scrape up. This was more than he had at first hoped, because of the fact that he owned two houses in the big city in which he had landed; and these houses, though old and small, happened to be located in the vicinity of a great industrial plant that had sprung up since the end of the war, and houses were going at soaring prices. They were snapped up at once at a sum that was fabulous in comparison with their real value. This, with what he had brought home and the bonus he received on landing, exactly covered his indebtedness to the man who was to have been his father-in-law; and, when he turned away from the window where he had been telegraphing the money to his lawyer in a far State with instructions to pay the loan at once, he had just forty-six cents left in his pocket. Suddenly, as he reflected that he had done the last thing there was left that he now cared to do on earth, the noises of the great city got hold upon his nerve, and tore and racked it. He was filled with a great desire to get out and away from it, he cared not where, only so that the piercing sounds and rumbling grind of the traffic of the city should not press upon the raw nerves and torture them.