the paved streets he returned as swiftly as his feet and his indifferent fortune could carry him.  Besides, he had grown hungry for familiar sights and faces, and perhaps, down deep, curiosity had been the mainspring of his return.  Even bitter ties have a pull that cannot always be denied.  At Fairview the presence of Monet had held him almost a willing captive.  There was something about the flame burning in that almost frail body that had lighted even the ugliness of Fairview with a strange beauty.  He could not think of him as dead.  That last moment had been too tinged with the haunting poetry of life.  How often he had reconstructed that scene—­the gray, sullen rain pattering on the spent leaves, the quick-rushing sound of a body in flight, the sudden leap of a soul toward greater freedom!  And then the vision of the churning pool below closing in triumphantly as it might have done upon some reclaimed pagan creature that had tasted the bitter wine of exile and returned in leaping joy to its chosen element!  It was not the shock and sadness of death that had sent Fred Starratt for a moment stark mad into the storm and freedom, but rather an ecstasy of loneliness ... a yearning to match daring with daring.

And now he was home again, in his own gray-green city, lying beneath tattered quilts in a hovel, with the selfsame February sun that had once pricked him to a spiritual adventure flooding in upon him!  He rose and threw open the door.  The soft noontide air floated in, displacing the fetid atmosphere.  He looked about the room searchingly.  In the daylight it seemed even more unkempt, but less forbidding.  A two-burner kerosene stove stood upon an empty box just under the window.  On another upturned box at its side lay a few odds and ends of cooking utensils, shriveling bits of food, a plate or two.  He found a loaf of dry bread and cut a slice from it.  This, together with a glass of water, completed his breakfast.

He tried to brush his weather-beaten clothes into decency with a stump of a whisk broom and to wipe the dust of the highroad from his almost spent shoes.  But, somehow, these feeble attempts at gentility seemed to increase his forlorn appearance.

He went over and straightened out the bedcoverings.  At least he would leave the couch in some semblance of order.  What did Storch expect him to do?  Come back again for shelter?  He had no plans, but as he went out, banging the door, he felt no wish to return.

His first thought now was to see Ginger.  He went to the Turk Street address.  He found a huge frame mansion of the ’eighties converted into cheap lodgings.  The landlady, wearing large jet and gold ornaments, eyed him suspiciously.  Miss Molineaux no longer lived there.  Her present address?  She had left none.  Thus dismissed, he turned his steps toward the Hilmers’.