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198 shutters and desolate ranks of unlighted lamps. He was a little nervous and wished once or twice for a revolver, but the slinking forms which passed him in the darkness were too weak with hunger to be dangerous, he thought, and he passed on unmolested to his doorway. But there somebody sprang at his throat. Over and over the icy pavement he rolled with his assailant, tearing at the noose about his neck, and then with a wrench sprang to his feet.

“Get up,” he cried to the other.

Slowly and with great deliberation, a small gamin picked himself out of the gutter and surveyed Trent with disgust.

“That’s a nice clean trick,” said Trent; “a whelp of your age! You’ll finish against a dead wall! Give me that cord!”

The urchin handed him the noose without a word.

Trent struck a match and looked at his assailant. It was the rat-killer of the day before.

“H’m! I thought so,” he muttered.

“Tiens, cest toi?” said the gamin tranquilly.

The impudence, the overpowering audacity of the ragamuffin took Trent’s breath away.

“Do you know, you young strangler,” he gasped, “that they shoot thieves of your age?”

The child turned a passionless face to Trent.

“Shoot, then.”

That was too much, and he turned on his heel and entered his hotel.

Groping up the unlighted stairway, he at last reached his own landing and felt about in the darkness for the door. From his studio came the sound of voices, West’s hearty laugh