He shook his head with an air of sadness. "I don't want to marry. I was married once for about a year. It was when I was a kid. I guess she was a pretty nice girl, but she was too much like her mother, and when she went I swore I'd keep out o' that kind o' trouble. But they're closin' in on me. One of 'em's sure to get me. I don't know which one, or mebbe I could head her off. I ought to keep away from 'em, but I can't leave 'em alone, and they won't leave me alone. Oh, hell!" He rose with a groan. "Well, send round the kid," he said, and carefully pulling down his vest and smoothing his dozen hairs, he rejoined his friends. As David left the café he heard a deep roar from the Mayor, and had a glimpse of a fair suitress of forty rebuking the Mayor's mouth with her muff. David sent Tom to the Mayor, and walked over to a hardware store on the Bowery to order some new ash cans. As he was returning through the Bowery a man stepped to his side with a quiet, "Hello, pal." Startled, David looked about. Beside him was a wiry, gray man, with deep-lined face and a keen, shifty eye. It was a man David had known in prison--a cynical, hardened gentleman who had been running counter to the law for thirty years, during which time he had participated in scores of daring robberies and had known most of the country's cleverest criminals. Bill Halpin was his name--at least the most recent of his dozen or two. Halpin had taken a fancy to David while they were prison-mates, why David could not understand; and his greeting was warm to come from one of his contemptuous nature. The two walked on together, and David, in response to Halpin's queries, told that he had gone to work with the determination to live honestly. Halpin gave a sneer of unbelief--he sneered at all things save the frankly evil--but said nothing. When they reached David's tenement, David asked him in, but he said he had an engagement with a pal, and went away after promising to come around some other time. David shovelled the furnace full of coal and was beginning his preparations for dinner, aglow with his new hopes and with the thought that he had regained Helen for his friend, when there was a knock at his door. He opened the door, expecting his usual caller--a tenant with a grievance. Kate Morgan stepped into the room. David had seen her in finery before, but never in such finery as now. There was a white velvet hat with two great black plumes that curled down upon her back hair; a long black coat, through whose open front glowed the warm red of a gown; a black fur scarf round her neck and a black muff enclosing her white-gloved hands. She stepped into the room and her eyes--brighter than ever were the eyes of the furs' original owners--gleamed over the scarf with hard defiance. "Good evening, _Mister_ Aldrich." David flushed. "Good evening." He drew his one rocking-chair toward her. "Won't you sit down?"