"Mr. Sybarite--!" she murmured, wide-eyed.
He remarked her action with a gesture almost of supplication.
"Don't be alarmed," he begged; and there was in his voice the least
flavour of bitterness. "I'm not going to say anything I
shouldn't--anything you wouldn't care to hear. I'm not altogether mad,
Miss Blessington; only...
"Well!" he laughed quietly--"when my run of luck set in to-night back
there at the gambling house, I told myself it was _Kismet's_
doing--that this was my Day of Days. If I had thought, I should
instead have called it my Night of Nights--knowing it must wear out
with the dawn."
His gesture drew her heed to the east; where, down the darkling,
lamp-studded canyon of a cross-town street, stark against a sky
pulsing with the faintest foreboding of daybreak, the gaunt,
steel-girdered framework of the new Grand Central Station stood--in
its harshly angular immensity as majestic as the blackened skeleton of
a burnt-out world glimpsed against the phosphorescent pallor of the
last chill dawn....
In the great ball-room behind them, the last strains of dance music
were dying out.
"Now," said the little man with a brisker accent, "by your leave, we
get back to what we were discussing; your welfare--"
"Mr. Sybarite," the girl interrupted impetuously--"whatever happens, I
want you to know that I at least understand you; and that to me you'll
always be my standard of a gentleman brave and true--and kind.
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