Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/418

 in Lower Sullivan Street; and in paying the bar-keeper he drew out a handful of bills and displayed them with a recklessness that had its inevitable issue, for when he left that bar-room two wolfish mulattoes followed him to the street; and the fog closed over the thugs and their victim.

In the morning he was found lying in a passage-way that led to a rear tenement, his pockets rifled, insensible from the blow of a black-jack on the back of his head.

There was no Christmas Eve dinner in Don's flat that next day. Conroy lay in the hospital, unconscious, between life and death. Bert Pittsey had accused Don of being the blundering cause of each step in his cousin's downfall and the wilful agent of his last undoing. Miss Morris's silence had left him no doubt of her disgust of him. All the failures of his life had crushed down on him together and buried him in the depths.

He sat at midnight, before his writing-table, unable to go to bed, staring as if he had seen a ghost; and the ghost that he had seen was the memory of his dead past, risen to rebuke him with the crimes of his incapacity. He saw his mother with that face of sorrow which had so often looked out on him from his dreams. He saw his father leaning across the cluttered dining-table, glaring at him in angry accusation. He saw Miss Morris watching him from the crowded stage of "The Rajah's Ruby," dumbly tragical. The glazed eyes of Conroy's hatred stared at him like the dull eyes of the dead. He shuddered at the thought that some day Margaret's face might join that company of malevolence and accuse him of the wreck of her life.