After that there were three miserable years when they lived in a little apartment on the Rue de Sèvres, up four flights of stairs with a _bonne à tout faire_. His mother had had to conquer the extravagant habits of a lifetime, and she did it ill. During the last year of her life the sale of her jewels kept them. Barry was eighteen when she died, and those long last days when she lay on the sofa in the remnants of the rich and splendid clothes she found it so hard to do without were burned into his memory forever. Their furniture--some of which was rare and handsome--brought them in a few hundred francs, and on this he lived for another year, eking out his substance with his first tentative attempts at journalism. When he was twenty-one he received a legal notice that his father had died in Venezuela, leaving him all he possessed, which, debts paid and the estate settled, amounted to about ten thousand dollars. This might have been a fortune to the youth, but the bitter bread he had eaten had soured the best in him. He took his legacy and resolved to taste of the joy of life. For several years he lived on the crest of the wave, now and then diverting himself with journalism, the only profession that attracted him and one in which his talents were readily recognized. He saw much of the world and its ways, living in many cities and among many peoples. He tried to cut himself off from the past, adopting, after his mother’s death, her old stage name of Essex. Then, his money spent, there had been a dark interval of bad luck and despondency, when Barry Essex, the brilliant amateur journalist, had fallen out of the ranks of people that are seen and talked about. Without means, he sank to the level of a battered and out-at-elbows Bohemian. There was a year or two when he swung between London and Paris, making money as he could and not always frequenting creditable company. Then the tide of change struck him and he went to New York, worked there successfully till once again the _Wanderlust_ carried him farther afield. He had now arrived at the crucial point of his career. In his vagabond past there were many episodes best left in darkness, but nothing that stamped him as an outcast by individual selection. Shady things were behind him in that dark, morose year when he found disreputable company to his taste. But he had never stepped quite outside the pale. There had always been a margin. Now he stood on that margin. He was thirty years old with shame and bitterness behind him, and before him the dead monotony of a lifetime of work. He hated it all. No memory sustained him. The past was as sore to dwell on as the future was sterile. It was the parting of the ways. And where they parted he saw Mariposa standing drawing him by the hand one way, while he gently but persistently drew her the other.