Vickers was silent. He walked to the window and looked out at the city which lay like a spider’s web, far below him. He was a quick-tempered man, and had had his moment of feeling that personal violence was the only possible answer to Emmons, but the seriousness of the decision served to calm him. If he had had only the personal risk to consider, he would probably have gone. Twice in his life he had escaped the arm of the law. He did not doubt he could do it again. Indeed, there was something tempting in the mere idea. But his soul rebelled at running away from the whole situation--from the whole situation, and Nellie. He gave no name to the strange mixture of admiration and antagonism which she aroused in him, but he found no difficulty in giving a name to his feeling for Emmons. He would have wished to stay merely to put a spoke in his wheel. And what did it commit him to--to stay a day, or a week? He could always disappear the moment the situation became irksome. There was no obligation involved to Emmons certainly. If _he_ chose to leave him day after day in the same house with his _fiancée_---- Ever afterward the sight of a city spread out below him brought the decision of that morning back to him. “Well,” he said finally, “I’ll stay for the present.” “I thought you would. We’ll go downtown now. And by the way, while we are on the subject, I wish to say that we can not have you running up bills in your father’s name. In old times there was money to pay them. Now there does not seem to be. I’ll get my hat.” Left alone, Vickers turned from the window. “It serves me right,” he thought; “I ought to have stayed and had it out with Cortez. Ah, Rosita, Rosita, your face was round and empty like the moon, but you would not have got a fellow in a fix like this.” Chapter V It had always been Vickers’s boast that he had never worked for any one but his own father, and, as he usually added, not very long for him. To find himself sitting on a high stool in a dark office, copying Emmons’s letters for him, struck him as supremely ridiculous. In South America he had been a person of some importance, and the contrast amused, even while it annoyed him. The work was not hard, but the hours, he noticed, were long. It was after six, on this first day, before he reached home. The sound of voices in the drawing-room warned him of visitors, and, like the true home-coming American, he stole quietly upstairs to his own room. About seven, Plimpton knocked on his door, to say that Miss Lee would be glad to speak to him for a few minutes in the drawing-room, before dinner. Vickers was an optimist. A thousand agreeable possibilities occurred to him. He dressed quickly--he had had time for a little shopping on his way uptown, and was able to appear in the conventional evening dress of the Anglo-Saxon.