“Ah!” said Bromley at the finish; “I’m mighty glad you told me that, Reddick. I saw him putting the girl on the train and was by way of doing him a rank injustice. Afterward, I offered him his chance to tell me about it, but of course he wouldn’t take it; he isn’t built that way.” “You’ve hit the nail on the head, Harry. In some ways, Phil is as queer as they make ’em. He has developed into an all-night rounder, all right; don’t make any mistake about that; but in spots he is as soft nowadays as he used to be high-headed and flinty when I first knew him a year ago. They tell me he has his hand in his pocket for the down-and-out every minute of the day. I’d like to know what hit him. It must have been something pretty solid to give him the jolt he’s had.” “It was,” Bromley confirmed; but he added nothing to the bare admission. “Some girl go back on him?” “No; for a man of his make-up it was something even worse than that. I can’t tell you what it was, because, thus far, it is his own secret--or he believes it is.” “I’ve quit,” said the passenger agent; and so the subject died. After this explanation of the girl-at-the-train incident, Bromley breathed freer; and though he saw less and less of Philip as time passed, he continued to hope for the best, the hope founding itself upon nothing better, however, than an illogical theory of reactions good, bad and indifferent--swings of the pendulum, he called them. When Philip should see the ghastly emptiness of the life he was living--and he was too intelligent not to see it, in time--he would pick himself up out of the mire into which the blow to his pride had buffeted him and be the better and broader man for the humbling experience. Something of this confidence the play-boy tried to pass on to Jean; and he could see that while she caught at it eagerly there was always a shadow in the dark eyes when Philip was mentioned. Bromley knew what was behind the shadow: it was the fear that she had once put into words--that the prisoner of reproach would end by taking some step which could never be retraced--that would put him once for all beyond the hope of redemption and reinstatement. Wise in his generation, the play-boy knew that there might be such a step; knew, also, that a man of Philip’s temper and resolution would be precisely the one to take it if the expiatory urge should drive him far enough and hard enough.