“All right; we’ll get together again. While you are here, my office is at your disposal, of course. Come around and make it your loafing place.” After Drew had left him, Philip lighted another of the mild cigars and took to the streets, walking until he was sodden with weariness. Again and again the meager details of Garth’s tragedy passed themselves in review. So the big miner had once made his little gesture of righteousness by marrying a woman of the class for which the world has no place of repentance, had he? That was fine! How crassly he had misjudged Garth. Bromley’s insight had been better. Was the play-boy’s assumption that there was no hard-and-fast line to be drawn between the sheep and the goats--that there was good in the worst and bad in the best--the right one, after all? Philip’s thoughts went back to the scene of the early morning when he had awakened to find a girl with pencilled eyebrows and painted lips sitting on the edge of his bed in the strange room. “Scum of the earth,” he had been calling her and her kind; and yet she, and her still more degraded house mistress, had taken him in and cared for him, and had not robbed him and turned him helpless into the street, as they might have done. He had a vivid picture of the girl sitting there and laughing at him as he opened his eyes. She was pretty, in a way, and her talk and manner had given him the impression of recklessness and misguiding rather than hardness. Was she one of these who are more sinned against than sinning? He wondered. Tired out finally, he returned to the hotel and went to bed. In the life which was already withdrawing into a far-away past he had always been able to fall asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow; but now, though it was past midnight and he was weary to utter exhaustion, sleep would not come. Over and over the harrowing details of the discovery of his father and the scene in the upper room over the gambling den rehearsed themselves as he tossed and tumbled and tried to banish them; and at last, in sheer desperation, he got up and dressed and went down to the lobby floor. The bar-room was closed, and he appealed to the night clerk, money in hand. “I’m sick and can’t sleep,” he said. “Couldn’t you break in back there and get me a drink? I don’t want to take to the streets at this time of night.” The clerk smiled knowingly. “Got a hang-over, have you? I guess I can fix you.” He disappeared, to return presently with a pint bottle of whiskey. “Think that will do the business for you?” he asked. “Yes; thanks. Don’t bother about the change.” Once more in his room, he slipped out of his clothes, took a stiff drink, and stretched himself upon the bed. In a little time the curious and altogether pleasant feeling of levitation came and he floated off through a spacious region of dreams which grew vaguer and vaguer until they vanished in an abyss of forgetfulness. XVIII