"I have come to learn when this poor child is to be buried, gentlemen," he began, with that ready emotion which is easily stirred and runs to volubility. "I didn't know her until a few days ago, when she took a small room in the house where I board. She kept to herself, but her manner was sunny and gracious, and her refinement was a matter of comment among us. None of us suspected that she was contemplating--this! I passed her in the hallway the night before it happened, and she smiled at me." Boone sat afterward in the dreary little mortuary chapel while a clergyman whom, the undertaker said, "came in in these cases," performed, with the perfunctoriness of routine, the services for the dead. Later, still with the gray little man at his side, the Kentuckian drove in the one cab that followed the hearse to a Brooklyn cemetery where Boone had paid for a grave. The little man, it seemed, had been a character actor and, from his own testimony, one of ability beyond the appreciation of a flippant present. Their mission today recalled to his mind others of like nature, and as he talked of them, enlarging upon the piteous helplessness of young women whose gentle natures are unequipped for the predatory struggles of a city where one does not know one's next-door neighbour, Boone's anxieties grew heavier. Those months of unavailing search stood always out luridly in his memory, and because his search was a thing that could accommodate itself to no rule except to follow faint trails into all sorts of places, he grew to an astonishing familiarity with parts at least of the town whose boast it is that no man knows it. It was natural that he should take up his own quarters near Greenwich Village, where the fringes of the town's self-styled bohemia trail off from Washington Square. There, with all its eccentricities and absurdities, effort dwelt side by side with dilettante anarchy, and strugglers with definite goals brushed shoulders with the "brittle intellectuals that crack beneath a strain." He grew to know some of the sincere workers of this American _Quartier Latin_ and some exponents of affectation-ridden cults who travesty life and the arts under creeds of pathetically shallow pretence. But these things, though absorbed into observation were small, foreground details of Boone's life at that time. The motif of the picture was the vain search for Anne Masters, and the whole was drawn against the sombre and colossal background of the war itself. For in those epic months was fought the First Battle of the Marne. In them Hindenburg emerged from the obscurity of retirement to drive the Russian hordes back from East Prussia, and, most tragic of all, the flood was sweeping across Belgium. If he could think little of other matters than the girl he loved and had come to seek, neither could the spirit that McCalloway had shaped ever quite escape a deep feeling of the war, like an incessant rolling of distant and sinister drums.