"I ought to be decent enough to lie to you and say that I am," he returned, hardily. "I know you can't understand; you are too good and innocent to understand. I'm ashamed; that is, the civilized part of me is ashamed; but that is all. Knowing that he ought to be in the dust at your feet, the brutal other-man is unrepentant and riotously jubilant because, for a brief second or two, he was able to break away and----" Her fingers had found the bell-push and were pressing it. When the custodian opened the door, Miss Grierson was her poiseful self again. "Number three-forty-five-A is Mr. Kenneth Griswold's box, now," she announced briefly. "Please register it in his name, and then help him to put it away and lock it up." Griswold went through the motions with the key-bearing young woman half-absently. By this time he was fathoms deep in the reactionary undertow. Must the recovered treasure always transform itself into a millstone to drag him down into some new and untried depth of degradation? Thrice he had given it up for lost, and in each instance its reappearance had been the signal for a relapse into primitive barbarism, for a plunge into the moral under-depths out of which he had each time emerged distinctively and definitely the loser. Was it to be always thus? Could it be even remotely possible that in a candidly material world there could still be standing-room for the myths and portents and superstitious traditions? He was trying to persuade himself that there could not be standing-room when he rejoined Margery--herself the best imaginable refutation of the old-wives' tales--at the gate in the great steel grille. Man-like, he was ready to be forgiven and comforted; and there was at least oblivion in her charming little shudder as the custodian shot the bolts of the gate to let them out. "_Br-r-r!_" she shivered, "I can never stand here and look at the free people out there without fancying myself in a prison. It must be a dreadful thing to be shut away behind bolts and bars, forgotten by everybody, and yet yourself unable to forget. Do you ever have such foolish thoughts, Mr. Griswold?" For one poignant second fear leaped alive again and he called himself no better than a lost man. But the eyes that were lifted to his were the eyes of a questioning child, so guilelessly innocent that he immediately suffered another relapse into the pit of self-despisings. "You have made me your poor prisoner, Miss Grierson," he said, speaking to his own thought rather than to her question. And when they reached the sidewalk and the trap: "May I bid you good-by here and go to my own place?" "Of course not!" she protested. "Mr. Raymer is coming to dinner to-night and he will drive you over to Mrs. Holcomb's afterward, if you really think you must go." And for the first time in their comings and goings she let him lift her to the high driving-seat. XXIII CONVERGING ROADS