What is it? Where is it? Not always in the eyes or on the lips, not always expressed in dress or even bearing--in no one thing that one may lay a finger on and say, "I know him by this mark!" There is no name for that elusive, eloquent, yet indelible sign life sets upon the faces of the lost. Yet all men know it when they see it, and instinctively turn away their eyes. In the group that closed about Mary, some one was protesting about something. "Perhaps Jean Latreille was right," said a man Gano couldn't see. "Of course he was. _You_ need not to blame him." Some one was speaking with a strong French accent. "Well, well," said the woman with the gray hair. "I don't feel sure it ought to be encouraged _openly_." "Zen, ought you not to belong to zis club?" The woman turned up an anxious face. "I've sent the girls away, Mrs. Pitman," said Mary, gently. "I think those of us that are left here, even the new members, have borne so much that they are able to bear the truth." There was a rustle and a noise of sitting down. "M. Pernet is right, I think, although I'm sorry Jean should have deserted his wife and child. It would have been manlier not to buy his liberty at the price of others' suffering." "That's what _I_ say." The gray-haired woman nodded at some one out of sight. "But who can decide the problems of another soul?" Mary Burne's white face grew weary. "We have enough with our own." "Parfaitement." "You may be sure," she went on, nodding gravely at her dingy audience, "a young man in vigorous health doesn't wrench himself out of the world without good cause. It's grown too common to be any longer a distinction"--she smiled bitterly--"and yet it's not common enough to be any easier, or any less reviled." Her eyes travelled from one forlorn face to the other with a kindling compassion. "But let us take courage, friends; we who have done without bread can do without approval--except of one kind." She paused an instant; a look of fanaticism leaped into the white face. "No matter what we have done in the past, we will not live, from this time on, without self-respect. Two or three of us have talked a good deal here about our duties to each other. Let us think to-night of the ultimate duty we owe ourselves. You know already how some of us cannot find courage to live till we have first assured ourselves of courage to die, if need be. I've told you, one or two of you, that it was like that with me; that when hideous things drove me away from home, things I'd borne for years, and should never have borne a moment"--she flung up her head with swelling nostrils--"when my awakening came, I said to myself, 'I'll go away and work; I'll go to Paris; and if I can't live there decently, I shall die there.' All through the long voyage I kept thinking that I was probably going, as fast as the ship could carry me, towards my grave. When one has lived days like that, life doesn't daunt one any more, nor death either."