Stuart reached home from his walk thoroughly tired and dropped into a feverish sleep. A strange dream haunted this attempt to rest. He found himself laughing and chatting with Bivens on terms of intimate friendship. All feeling of resentment against him had gone. The little man had grown to be a great figure and he was happy in remembering their boyhood associations. And strangest of all, they had united in a feeling of hatred for Nan. She was the common enemy of both, and not only so, she was the enemy of all men. As she passed through the street, crowds were hissing and insulting her, and as she was entering her home they tried to kill her. A stone struck her beautiful forehead, and the blood was trickling down the white drawn face. He was hurling himself against the mob in a vain effort to reach her side, and while the crowd laughed and mocked, an officer mounted the steps and, instead of driving the mob back, began to strike her furiously with his club. Stuart waked with a cry--pressed his head and looked about the room, bewildered. The tip of a swinging limb was pounding against his window pane. He opened the window quickly and broke the twig. "What a nightmare!" he exclaimed, with a shiver. For hours its horror haunted his imagination. He dressed and started to his club for dinner, changed his mind and turned down Broadway for the old Cafe Boulevard on Second Avenue. He stopped again in front of the dingy Bible House at the head of the Bowery and watched the flood of shopgirls and clerks passing across the street from the department stores. What an endless throng! Hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands, men and women, girls and boys, hurrying homeward. He had never noticed them before--this mighty host of three hundred thousand women and five hundred thousand men who rush into these swarming hives every morning and stream out again in the gathering dusk of spring and the deepening nights of winter. For the first time they seemed human beings who might have hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, even as he. How strange the world began to look through the new eyes of pity a great sorrow had given him. How worn the faces of these children. They must be horribly overworked. What a pitiful, starved life for a child. He thought of his own childhood, and saw himself with swift bare feet roaming the open fields of the South.