"Thanks. I do know most of them," replied Dyker, nodding to two or three of the nearby cadets as he spoke. "But I have some business, too. These are busy times with me." They both made their way to the saloon's side door. "Goin' so soon?" chorused some of the habitués as Angel moved among them. He nodded, smiling cheerfully. "Goin' to kop out a new skirt?" inquired one. "Yas," responded Rafael, now with a frank, satisfied chuckle. "Then here's luck!" cried another. As the health was being drunk, Dyker passed through the door and turned, alone, into the cool night air of the street. Notwithstanding his natural bias, his severe schooling, and his honestly cynical and cynically limited view of this portion of his little world, he was ashamed of what he had just seen and heard and done, and he was disgusted. He walked down the avenue in the deepened shadows, for the first time in a long while more than half inclined to ask himself whether what he was to get was worth the price that he had already begun to pay for it; and for the first time, by way of answer, frankly facing the fact that the position of a corrupt magistrate was not much worse than that of a corrupt lawyer, and that neither position was much worse, and both certainly better paid, than the position in which his task had been to render anonymous assistance to the no less dubious course of more esteemed corporation attorneys. He was too occupied with these reflections, disquieting and consolatory, to observe well the persons that passed him. He continued his way along the curb rather because he had started upon it than because he at all cared about whither it led him, much as he was continuing his progress in the political maze in which his lot was cast. He kept his head bent, and so he did not see a pale-faced, large-eyed woman that, turning a hasty corner, almost collided with him and then suddenly drew back and crossed the street. There were changes in the woman's face, which might have precluded recognition. He had last seen her on the eve of a surgical operation and she had looked ill, but now, the cumulative effect of that and many other crises sat upon her, and it was only in her habitual gait, the swaying languid pace of an unstudied young animal, that he might have found enough to recall her to his memory. But Dyker's eyes were directed inward and so, when she turned aside to avoid the man that she fancied she had wronged, he did not realize that he had almost touched elbows with the woman he had once rescued, fresh from her dismissal from the sacred precincts of Mrs. Ferdinand Chamberlin's home.