One by one the shams had yielded to his prying gaze, and, but too well, he knew the truth of Tom Moore's trite remark, "False the light on glory's plume!" But, straightforward and sincere, he had never watched his own environment. The loss of his mother in his childhood and his father's lonely struggle to retrieve his fallen fortunes had left the boy without happy memories of boyhood, with no family history to aid him, and the embarrassment of his dependence upon Hugh Worthington had robbed him of the confidences incident to young manhood. Only in his books had he learned of the passionate, hot hearts beating behind the silken armor of womanhood. For who had noticed the dependent, the poor, plodding college boy? Worthington's Detroit home was a mere social machine-shop, a place of vanished glories during the adolescence of Miss Alice, and no Diana had stooped to kiss the forgotten young Endymion sleeping in the Lethe of a New York business obscurity. Clayton's life had been gilded by few joys. His whole nature rose up in a sudden rebellion against this "personally conducted" career in life. "I am to be a mere hoodwinked worker in this millionaire's treadmill. A bond slave to one of the great Trusts which are chaining the whole American population to the galley-oar for life. "I must be fairly paid, decently dressed, sufficiently fed, to play my part as a decent workman; that is all. We will see!" He had now crushed out all lingering remnant of a friendly feeling for Ferris. Even the last social invitation rankled in his mind. "I suppose that he wanted to pump me, at ease, under the guise of a homelike hospitality. If there is any little game being played around me, I will now take a hand in it." As he moved to the door, the memory of that bewitching woman's face rose up once more to thrill the very core of his lonely heart. "She looked lonely. Perhaps she is, like myself, a solitary sail on Life's lonely ocean. And I shall never see her again! Lost in New York's human flood. But I'll buy that picture, if I live till Monday. It will call her back to me; bring back her vanished loveliness." A motley crowd was pouring into the various doors of the huge hostelry, for the evening trains were depositing the flotsam and jetsam of humanity into busy Gotham. Prosperous tourists, crafty schemers, brazen politicians, overdressed drummers, and flashy sporting men were pouring in to seek the "first aid to the weary," which the nearest available hotel affords to the cramped and jaded traveler. Even the sidewalks were now thronged with anxious-eyed women, some of them with wildly-beating hearts, awaiting the kind "gentleman friend" who so often mysteriously appears at the cross-roads of Life. From the Forty-second Street Station the "new departure" of many a life has begun, the radial lines often curving downward into the sheer depths of ruin of the Morgue, or the darkened abysses of the Tenderloin.