A few minutes later Essex heard a crash from his neighbor’s room, and then exclamations of anger and dole. These continuing with an increased volume, Essex rose and went to the source of sound. The room was pitch dark, and from it, as from the entrance to the cave of the damned, imprecations and lamentations were issuing in a strenuous flood. With the match he had brought he lit the gas, and turning, saw his late visitor holding by the foot-board of the bed, having overturned a small stand, which had evidently been surmounted by a nickel clock. “What the devil do you mean by making such a noise?” he said angrily. “Pardon, pardon!” said the other humbly, “but I couldn’t find the gas this time, Doc. This is a small room, but things do get away somehow.” He looked stupidly about with his bleared eyes. The room was small and miserably dirty and uninviting. “There’s a room,” he said suddenly in a loud, dramatic tone and with a sweep of his arm, “for a man who might er been a bonanza king!” Essex turned to go. “If you make any more of this row to-night I’ll see that you’re turned out to-morrow,” he said haughtily. He wheeled about on the drunkard as he spoke. The man’s sodden face was lit with a flash of malevolent intelligence, to be superseded immediately by a wheedling smile. “I seen you before to-day,” he said. “Well, you’ll see me again to-night if you don’t keep quiet, and this time you won’t like it.” “You was with a lady, a fine-looking lady.” “Here--no more of that talk,” said Essex threateningly. The man stopped, looking furtively at him as if half expecting to be struck. Essex turned toward the door and passed out. As he did so he heard him mutter: “And I’d seen her before, too.” Back in his room the young man took up his book again, but the thread of his interest was broken. His mind refused to return to the prescribed channels before it, but began to drift here and there on the wayward currents of memory. The house was now perfectly quiet. The little fire had fallen together into a pleasant core of warmth that genially diffused its heat through the room. Essex, sprawling in his chair, his long arms following its arms, his finely-formed, loose-jointed hands depending over the rounded ends, let his dreaming gaze rest on this red heart of living coal, while his pipe smoke lay between it and his face in delicate layers. His thoughts slipped back over childish memories to his first ones, when he had lived a French boy’s life with his mother in Paris.