"Good luck, my boy," was the cheery answer. "I was a poor soldier to-night myself until the little weasel told me an obvious lie and I took courage." "Funny if Bivens should do anything obvious." "Wasn't it? He pretended to have come in a mood of generosity--his offer of settlement inspired by love." "The devil must have laughed." "So did I--especially when he told me that he was engaged to be married." "Engaged--to--be--married?" Stuart made a supreme effort to appear indifferent--"to whom?" "To Miss Nan Primrose, a young lady I haven't the honour of knowing, and he had the lying audacity to say that he came at her suggestion." Stuart tried to speak and his tongue refused to move. "I was frank enough to inform him that he was a liar. For which, of course, I had to apologize. Well, you've helped me to-night, boy, more than I can tell you. It helps an old man to look into the eyes of youth and renew his faith. Good-night!" The doctor began to lower the lights, and Stuart said mechanically: "Good-night!" In a stupor of blind despair he slowly fumbled his way up to his room, entered, and threw himself across the bed without undressing. It was one thing to preach, another to face the thing itself alone in the darkness. Through the shadows of the long night he lay with wide staring eyes, gazing at the vision which would not vanish--the face of the woman he loved--cold, white, pulseless, terrible in its beauty, dead. CHAPTER VIII STRUGGLE The longer Stuart wrestled with the problem of Nan's yielding to the lure of Bivens's gold the more hideous and hopeless it became. He cursed her in one breath, and with the next stretched out his arms in the darkness in desperate voiceless longing. He rose at last and stood looking out his window on the moonlit Square. He began to feel that he had been to blame. Why had he allowed the foolish pride of a lovers' quarrel to keep them apart for two weeks? A clock in a distant tower struck three. The radiance of the massed lights of Broadway still glowed in the sky and dimmed the glory of the moon. The roar of the elevated trains sounded unusually loud and sinister. Perhaps because Bivens was on their board of directors. The whistle of their air brakes seemed to hiss his name. A crowd of revellers passed in a cab, with their feet out the windows, singing a drunken song. There was something sickening in the thought of this swiftly moving remorseless rush of a city's endless life. After all, was Nan worse than others--thousands of others caught in the merciless grip of its eternal spell? The clock struck five, he looked out the window, startled by the first soft light of the dawn.