It would have been useless, had he known it, to protest his virtue inside the drugstore or out; a curious chain of coincidents had preserved it. Again and again he had been at the point of surrendering his involuntary Eden, and always the accident, the interruption, had befallen, always he had retired in a state of more or less orderly celibacy. On the occasion of one of those nocturnal, metropolitan escapades by which matured boys, in a warm, red veil of whiskey, assert their manhood and independence, he had been thrust in a drunken stupor into the baggage car of the “owl” train to Ellerton. Instances might be multiplied: life, in its haphazard manner, its uncharted tides and eddies sweeping arbitrarily up and down the world, had carelessly preserved in him that concrete ideal which myriads of heroic and agonized beings had striven terribly and in vain to ward. And so it happened, when Doctor Allhop turned with an elaborate impropriety from the pills he was compounding in a porcelain pestle, that Anthony's laugh was loudest, his gusto most marked, in the group gathered at the back of the drugstore. A wooden screen divided them, hid the shelves of bottles, the water sink, and the other properties and ingredients of the druggist's profession, from the glittering and public exhibition of the finished article, the marble slab and silver mouths of the sodawater fountain, the uninitiated throng. He was sitting on a case of prepared food, his legs thrust out before him, and a thread of smoke coiling bluely from the cigarette held in his broad, scarred hand. There was a little gay song on his lips, and a roving, gay glint in his direct gaze. At frequent intervals he surveyed with approbation maroon socks and a pair of new and shining pumps; the rest of his apparel was negligent. The sole chair was occupied by the plump bulk of Thomas Addington Meredith, to whom a sharp nose in a moonlike countenance lent an expression of constant inquiry and foxy caution. He was elaborately apparelled in a suit which boasted a waistcoat draped with the gold chain of an authentic timepiece; while, closing a silver cigarette case scrolled large with his initials, a fat finger bore a ruby that, rumor circulated, had been the gift of a married woman. Lounging against a shelf Alfred Craik gazed absently at his blackened and broken fingernails, his greasy palms. He was Anthony's partner in the current industry of a machine shop and garage, maintained in a dilapidated stable on the outskirts of Ellerton. It was a concern mainly upheld by a daily levy on the Ball family for necessary tools and accessories. He was, as always, silent, detached.