"Yes," he answered quickly. "And could you do that? Could you care for a man who will have no career, who has no 'future'?" Sommers's voice had taken a new tone of earnestness, unlike the sober speculation in which they had been indulging. Miss Hitchcock turned her face to the faded landscape of the suburban fields, and failed to reply. "I have lived out my egotism," he continued earnestly. "What you would call ambition has been dead for long months. I haven't any lofty ambition even for scientific work. Good results, even there, it seems to me, are not born of personal desire, of pride. I am content to be a failure--an honest failure," he ended sharply. "Don't say that!" she protested, looking at him frankly. "I shall never agree to that." The people around them began to bestir themselves with the nervous restlessness of pent-up energy. Parker Hitchcock came into the car from the smoking-room. "We can get off at Twenty-second Street," he called out eagerly. "You're coming, doctor?" Sommers shook his head negatively, and Miss Hitchcock, who was putting on her veil, did not urge him to join them. The Hitchcock carriage was waiting outside the Twenty-second Street station, and, as the train moved on, Sommers could see Colonel Hitchcock's bent figure through the open window. When Sommers left the train at the central station, the September twilight had already fallen; and as he crossed the strip of park where the troops had bivouacked during the strike, the encircling buildings were brilliantly outlined in the evening mist by countless points of light. The scene from Twelfth Street north to the river, flanked by railroad yards and grim buildings, was an animated circle of a modern inferno. The cross streets intersecting the lofty buildings were dim, canon-like abysses, in which purple fog floated lethargically. The air was foul with the gas from countless locomotives, and thick with smoke and the mist of the lake. And through this earthy steam, the myriad lights from the facades of the big buildings shone with suffused splendor. It was large and vague and, above all, gay, with the grim vivacity of a city of shades. Streams of people were flowing toward the railroad, up and down the boulevard, in and out of the large hotels. A murmur of living, striving humanity rose into the murky air; and from a distance, through the abysses of the cross streets, sounded the deeper roar of the city. The half-forgotten note of the place struck sharply upon the doctor's ear. It excited him in some strange way. Two years had dropped from his life, and again he was turning, turning, with the beat of the great machine. CHAPTER XII "Yes, he lost that--what was left when you sold for him," Miss M'Gann admitted dejectedly. "And so we had to start over again. Part of it was mine, too." "Did he put your savings in?" Sommers asked incredulously.