When Admeh Drake looked up to the clock tower above his head, he was surprised to see that it was already a quarter to twelve. He had waited nearly an hour. He began to be impatient, nervous, suspicious. Maidslow should have returned with Maxie long before this. Something must have happened, or else—he grew frightened at the thought—they had given him the slip, and would avoid paying him the thousand dollars as his share of the plot. He waited now with less hope. Surely, if they were coming at all, they would have returned before this. He lost interest in the passers-by, and watched only for the two who were to bring him his reward. The clock struck noon, and the throng was swelled by clerks and business men released for their lunch hour. One o’clock, and the tide poured back again. Two, and he grew weary with standing, and sat upon the pedestal of the Fountain. Three, and he gave up all hope. The excitement which had kept him up all night relaxed. He was faint and limp from lack of food and sleep. So he, too, joined the human current and drifted along Kearney Street with no set plan of action. He turned into the Old Plaza, at Portsmouth Square, his eyes caught by a sparkle of light from the gilded sails of the little bronze ship on the Stevenson Memorial. He walked nearer to see what it was, and as he approached he perceived a young man in a red sweater reading the inscription on the marble shaft. It was the Harvard Freshman. “_To be honest, to be kind_,” Coffin was reading, “_to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence_”—and then he turned away with a bitter protest in his throat, to see the Hero of Pago Bridge looking over his shoulder. “Pretty, ain’t it!” said Admeh Drake, and he, too, looked at the immortal quotation from the “Christmas sermon.” Had it been written for him alone, it could not have stung him more fiercely. “—_To renounce, when that shall be necessary, and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation—above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself—here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy_.” He turned to Coffin with despair in his eye, all that was best in him writhing at these graven words. “Say, what the hell did they stick that up here for, right where every man that has failed can read it and eat out his heart?” Coffin slapped him on the back in sympathy, for even the irrepressible Freshman seemed for the moment to be touched by the admonitory legend. But he was not one to be serious for long, and after that one swift glance into his soul, his customary spirit asserted itself.