rat-tail cigars, at a penny apiece, for the men at the finish. Yes, indeed, there were feasts at times, wonderful feasts, that many a night made the disconsolate young scholar on the top floor envy his humbler-minded neighbors. And there were gardens, too--gardens that could be taken in when the policeman ordered it--tufts and shreds of green in tin cans and starch-boxes, as green almost as the grass in the Park. And there was color, bless you--color enough to dazzle one's eyes--on a windy Monday morning, when the pulley-lines that stretched from the windows fluttered and swayed with the week's myriad-tinted washings. But it was all strangely and sadly new to Hartley. CHAPTER VI THE TWO VOICES And so he lost, for like a sword Still in his bosom prest Her perilous face, and each soft word Like thorns still tore his breast. JOHN HARTLEY, "The Broken Knight." It's in the lulls of life that great things are lost and won.... You struggle against the tides that beset you, and you hold your own; but those tides never rest, and in the hour that you wait to call for peace--then the waters shall carry you back.--"The Silver Poppy." Hartley dined frugally, though somewhat late, that night. Time had slipped away unnoticed in his close little room till he woke to the fact that he was extremely hungry. He was glad to get out into the open night air, but as he sniffed at it gingerly on his way back to his room once more there came to him, with a sudden pang, a memory of the evening odors that hung over the far-away valley of the Isis. As he stepped in through the jail-like doorway he all but stumbled over Repellier, waiting for him there. "I was down in this part of town," he explained, "so I decided to drop in on you for a while--I have a model who hangs out in Chatham Street." "Come up; come up, by all means," cried Hartley, elated. As the younger man and his visitor picked their way through the narrow halls of the tenement-house it was obvious to them both that the supper hour of that district was not yet over. For the smell of many cooking and overcooked meals, mingling with the odors that drifted at all times of the day up through the crowded building, was not altogether pleasing to the uninitiated nose. Repellier noticed, too, that Hartley looked listless and worn and tired, and in some way strangely altered. This was the gilded youth he had once beheld in a cushion-bestrewn punt on the Isis, reading Anacreon. Groping after him up the odoriferous narrow stairs, with a sudden deeper note of sympathy he asked Hartley how he had been getting along of late. "Five editorial rejections to-day," the young man answered half blithely, half solemnly. "But are you getting--what you expected out of things down here?" "As you see"--Hartley tried to laugh back, bravely enough--"I'm afraid I'm a sort of Zeno ground in my own mortar of squalidness."