It came home to me, as I stood there in the night upon the open street, that there was not one soul among all the city's sleeping millions who owed me aught but harm, and that even those who had drunk the wine of my hospitality had done so more in fear than in friendship. I had no friends but those who were bound to me in some devil's bargain--no kith, no kin, nor the memory of a mother's love. As I lingered there, like some outcast beast waiting for day to drive me to my lair, I envied, with a fierce hatred and with a bitter and passionate pity for myself, those to whom Fate had been more kind and given home and wife and children, or at least the affection of their fellow men, and I envied the lads I had known in college who led clean lives and who had shunned me--they knew not why--and the happy-go-lucky Quirk and his busy wife; and even old Tuckerman Toddleham, in his dingy office in Barristers' Hall. CHAPTER IX Daybreak found me still wandering in the streets, haunted by the fear that the police might already be upon my track and furious at the thought that one foolish step should have changed me from a prosperous and powerful member of the bar into a fugitive. Often in earlier days I had pitied the wretches who would come slinking into our office after nightfall, empty their pockets of gold and notes--taken often, no doubt, by force or fraud from others--and pour it out before us, begging for our aid to save them from punishment. It seemed incredible to me that human beings should have staked their liberty and often their lives for a few wretched dollars. Outcasts, they skulked through existence, forced, once they had begun, to go on and on committing crimes--on the one hand to live, and on the other to pay tribute to Gottlieb and myself, who alone stood between them and jail. How they had cringed to us. We were their masters, cracking the lash of blackmail across their shoulders and sharing equally, if invisibly, in their crimes! And how I had scorned them--fools, as they seemed to me, to take such desperate chances! Yet, as the sun rose, I now saw myself as one of the beings whom I had so despised. We were no longer their masters--they were our masters! Hawkins had us in his power. He alone could prevent us from donning prison stripes. Already the streets were beginning to stir. Wagons rumbled along the pavements. Streams of people emerged from the caverns of the east and trudged westward across the city. I circled the square and entered it from the lower side. My big brick mansion, with its stone trimmings--the home where I had held my revels and entertained my friends, where I had worked and slept--was but a stone's throw away. I strained my eyes to detect any signs of the police; but the street was empty. Then, pulling my hat down upon my head, I turned up my coat-collar and, glancing from side to side, hurried across the square and let myself in.