The coat caught her eye again, with its basilisk fascination. She sighed and stepped into the store to ask to see it again, although she knew it was as far out of her reach as a diamond tiara. To handle its soft richness made her sick with desire, but she couldn’t keep away from it when she was downtown. Her moving away startled Lester from his horrified gaze on nothingness, and he moved on with a jerky, galvanized gait like a man walking for the first time after a sickness. He had lost his job. He had been fired. At the end of the month there would be no money at all to keep things going, not even the little they had always had. Was it the earth he was treading, solid earth? It seemed to sway up and down under him till he was giddy. He _was_ giddy. He was going to faint away. Oh, that would be the last disgrace. To faint away on the street because he had lost his job. The world began to whirl around before his eyes, to turn black. He caught at a tree. For an instant his eyes were blurred, his ears rang loudly; and then with racking pains, consciousness began to come back to him. He still stood there, his arm still flung around the tree. He had not fainted. In the pause while he fought inwardly for strength to go on, when every step seemed to plunge him more deeply into the black pit of despair, he was conscious of a steady voice, saying something in his ear--or was it inside his head? The street was quite empty. It must be in his head. How plainly he heard it--another one of those tags of poetry which haunted him.... “But make no sojourn in thy outgoing, For haply it may be That when thy feet return at evening Death shall come in with thee.” At once it was as though strong wine had been held to his lips, as though he had drunk a great draught of vigor. His eye cleared, his heart leaped up, he started forward with a quick firm step. “When thy feet return at evening Death shall come in with thee.” There was no need to despair. He was not helplessly trapped. There was a way out. A glorious way! The best way all around. The rightness of it blazed on him from every point as he hurried up the street. It meant for the children that at last he would be able to give them money, real money, just like any father. There would be not only the ten thousand dollars from his insurance policy but five thousand at least for the house and lot. He had been offered that the other day. Actual cash. And not only actual cash, but emancipation from the blighting influence of a futile and despised father. The children didn’t despise him yet, but they would soon, of course. Everybody did. And Eva never lost a chance to bring home to them with silent bitterness the fact of their father’s utter worthlessness. Not that he blamed her, poor ambitious Eva, caught so young by the senses, and rewarded by such a blank as he!