OLLY GLEASON was a girl with big gray eyes. She and Jack Mechler had grown up together. Now she was a stenographer, earning twenty dollars a week. Mechler was a buildingwrecker, earning three dollars a day, together with some income through services of sorts for his district leader.

He had not made much of his life. He still had a clean body and a healthy mind, but no purpose. That was his trouble. This was in Molly Gleason's mind-was hidden behind the smile-when quite by chance she met him one spring afternoon beneath the tottering wall upon which his gang of wreckers was at work.

He looked at her curiously.

"It's a good while since I 've seen you, Molly." A little note of hesitation was in his voice.

"I thought you were going into the fire department."

"Well, I am," he said.

Her gray eyes flashed at him. "Yes you are!"

"Honest, Molly."

"Don't you remember," she went on unheedingly, "how you used to stand in front of old Engine 14 house after school, and how you used to say that some day you were going to be a fireman, too, and save lives, and put out fires? And what are you now!" Then she said: "It 's too bad about you, Jack. I'm sorry."

then spoke with decision, "You must come around and let me know how you 're getting along with your civil-service study."

Before he could reply, young Cullen, the policeman, who had been guarding one end of the street against pedestrians, came up with an air of proprietary irritability.

"Molly," he said, "you ought to know better than to be standing out here under this wall; you go in the house." And Mechler noted that she accepted his command demurely, and without reply proceeded to obey. Mechler called after her: "That's right what you said, Molly?" She turned bravely. "It sure is, Jack."

She went into the house, and the policeman cast upon Jack an insolent glare. Mechler had also gone to school with Cullen, but now for the first time in years some instinct of new-born respect and nascent ambition caused him to look upon the rising young policeman as an equal.

"You go, jump off the dock, Tom," were the rather homely words in which this new spirit of Mechler's found vent.

That night he cornered the leader of the district in the back room of the Uncas Club.

"Look here, Boss," he said, "I want to go into the fire department."

"Honest, Jack?" Newman looked at him and grinned appreciatively. "What do you want to be, a captain or a deputy

"Oh, I'm not kiddin'," retorted Mechler. "I'm tired of loafin' around."

The leader regarded him keenly. "All right," he said. "I guess I can fix it. I'll let you know."

"How about the civil service?"
Newman smiled.

"Oh, I can get John Larkin to make it right, I guess. You know the present fire commissioner has been trying to convince the civil-service guys that what the depart

ment needs is not light-weights who know all about Napoleon crossing the Andes, but could n't stand a breath of smoke or heft a school-girl down a twenty-foot ladder, but huskies like you, who ain't long on brains, maybe, but has got plenty of the ́strong-arm stuff." He looked admiringly at the brawny young fellow before him, the only man in the district he dared not try to knock down.

Mechler nodded.

"That 'll be all right; if I go in, I want to go in right. I had pretty good schooling. I have n't forgotten it all, and there 's a little girl-" He stopped abruptly as he caught a gleam of amusement in Newman's wintry blue eyes. "Hell!" he said, turning away.

The leader laughed, then he said sharply:

"Come on, now; don't go off your ear. It would n't have hurt you to have had a girl long ago."

Mechler's first impulse was toward a sharp reply, but a surging warmth, something not quite understood, prevailed. Feeling a bit foolish, he explained:

"It's a girl I used to go to school with. She's got a civil-service job in the dock department; she can tip me off."

"Oh," said Newman, dryly; "meantime you better come down to 18 Truck with me in the morning and have a talk with Deputy Flint."

So next day they called on that officer in his private room, and the big, kindly fireman, who had had much experience with men, gave Mechler a lot of pointed information; and sent him home with a red-bound civil-service guide for firemen and policemen. That was the beginning.

Mechler saw the deputy chief three times that week, but it came about that he saw Molly Gleason about two nights of every week. She was very patient with him not only because she was interested, but because there were emotions of warrantable pride that her influence had been such as to withdraw a young man from aimless wandering in vacuous grooves to definite paths of strongly wrought ambition. Perhaps the emotions were sufficiently dominant, the intended goal so large and so worth while, that the subtle shadings, the overtones, as it were, were not revealed to her, nor perhaps to Mechler, in their full significance. Yet once,

as she bent over him explaining a knotty point, her rippling brown hair not far from his cheek, he stopped short and looked at her vacantly, everything gone from his head.

"So, you see," she said, "you can't take eight from nothing unless you carry onebut you 're not listening, Jack."

"No," he said rather heavily, "that 's right." He laughed. "I guess my bean is all ivory to-night."

"Your head, Jack," she admonished gently.

"Sure, my head." He looked at her disgustedly. "Hell! I keep forgettin'-" He arose from the chair suddenly. "There I go again!"

He was through for that night, grouchily refusing her importunities to finish the review of his work, asserting he would. return when he had more sense. She saw him out the door, gaily trying to dissipate his mood, and always in after-life that was the picture of her he remembered most clearly a girl in a white dress rolling open at the throat, merry gray eyes, and lips half parted, showing flawless white teeth.

She did not see him again for a week, and then he came with a manner of forced negligence which secretly amused her, although it annoyed her a bit, too, since this, as it happened, was one of Cullen's regular nights. The young policeman arrived soon after, in fact, and obviously was not overjoyed at finding Mechler there, and sat sullen and morose until Jack took his departure, as he did rather earlier than usual. Cullen's demeanor had worried him only inasmuch as it affected the girl, whose manner after Cullen came was silent and preoccupied.

"I wonder what was bitin' him?" he mused as he walked up the street. "I'll hand him one some day."

He had always been a bit jealous of Cullen, who had had an easier life. Cullen's father, indeed, was a wealthy contractor, and his goal was a police inspectorship, to be attained without tedious delays arising from such trivial matters as merit and the like. Already a Rhinelander medal had been awarded to him for gallantry at a fire, a rescue, by the way, that firemen who knew regarded as a plant, pure and simple.

Mechler had been a probationer one

month when his first opportunity came at a fire in a shirt-waist factory, with girls penned on the upper floors. Truck 18, first to arrive, sent its extension-ladders to the fourth floor, where most of the panicstricken operatives were trapped, while Mechler and a comrade went to the roof, which they reached through the upper windows of the adjoining building, to open smoke-vents with their axes. Having done this, the two men made their way carefully down the sloping roof to the cornice over the street.

Peering over, they could see work of rescue going on at two of the fourth-story windows. But they also saw what the other firemen had not seen—a girl, almost concealed by the thick clouds of smoke, lying unconscious across a window remote from the ladders. Mechler sent his companion back to the chimney with the coil of rope that firemen on roof duty always carry with them, instructing him to make cne end fast around the chimney. When this was done, the young fireman went down the rope hand over hand, picked the unconscious girl from the sill, and then in the most gallant and spectacular fashion made his way to the sidewalk, while cameras snapshotted him, and thrilled reporters surged about him, pencils poised upon wet folds of copy-paper. Mechler scowled, and refused to answer their questions; when they persisted, he expressed his annoyance in uncomplimentary terms, and pushed his way back to the building and thus up to the roof again.

This incident, being the chief of an exciting fire, was treated with fitting importance in the public press, by which, it may be believed, the rescue lost nothing of its thrilling flavor or a single absorbing detail.

That evening Molly Gleason sat on the porch of her home, a newspaper containing an account of the rescue on her lap. An ardent photographer had snapped Mechler at close range, and something in the face under the helmet had caused the managing editor to place it on the front page, at the side of the double-column story. And that editor was right, for in a way the face seemed to illustrate and typify the whole story, to give point to it. Something would have been missing without it; it was the face of a man who would do just the thing described, who was capable

of doing more. There were animal lines to be discerned therein,-something that one catches in the lineaments of a tiger,but there were human lines, too,-primitively human, perhaps,-and knotted, bulging jaws; short, thick nose; heavy brows; smoldering eyes.

Molly took up the paper and studied the photograph again. There was that in the picture before her to which all that was feminine in her nature went out the fundamental attraction of the physically weak for the physically strong. There is a time in the life of every girl when she may wish to tame that which is wild in the other sex, an instinctive desire to which, in the case of this fireman, Molly had yielded, considering nothing that might lay beyond. Now in the graphic newspaper article before her she read justification. What he had been, what he was now, a saver of human life, gave point to her mood and made her proud. From the fact that on this beautiful spring evening a girl would be dead who was now alive, she took a portion of indirect credit, and there was something in this that made all she had done seem well worth while.

She thrilled now as she recalled the marked change that had come of late in Mechler's demeanor toward her, as of a man who had begun to justify himself and was minded to claim his birthright. It had alarmed her; but now, somehow, there was a fierce surging of joy, and at last, leaning back in her chair, letting the paper fall to the porch, she closed her

eyes.

Cullen passed on his way from the station-house, and stopped for a few moments, as was his wont. She was strangely silent, and he picked up the paper at her side, meeting Mechler, as it were, face to face. He glanced hastily at the headlines, then let the paper fall. She understood, but said nothing, and the young policeman understood, too.

"Well, good night," he muttered in at strained voice, and walked down the steps and thus away.

That night Mechler came to see her. She rather expected him, and was glad; for she was still warm with her emotions, and filled with a sense of the added personality with which she had invested him. In this mood she had expected to find something akin in him, a flash of spark to

spark, fusing nature to nature. And it was as though she sustained a sharp and unlooked-for rebuff when she found him, on the surface, at least, as he always had been. If his deed of the day had much exalted or thrilled him in retrospect, that fact was not apparent. And it was like an iceberg to her. For a few minutes she followed his general conversation, careless as always as to phraseology and ideas, and at last, as though desperately determined to penetrate into his inner self, she broke in upon what he was saying, facing him with flushing cheeks and flashing eyes.

"I'm proud of you, John. You certainly made good to-day."

"Aw," he said, shrugging, "there was some excitement. I hoisted a dame with a chestful of smoke out a window."

He said it not with self-consciousness or with embarrassment; merely stated a fact for what it was worth in a manner which accurately indicated the small value with which he appraised it.

"But," she protested, "that was a big thing, John. You took her down a rope and- She checked herself, seeing he was gazing at her curiously. "Well," she concluded, "it was not much, after all, I guess."

"Not much," Mechler frowned. "The little fool hung out the window, where all the smoke was, instead of keeping her head on the floor. There was no fire in the room,-no chance of any,- and not enough smoke to have hurt her if she had n't gone off her head."

"I see," she said kindly; "but it is a great thing to save a human life."

Mechler raised his shoulders.

"Is it? I've saved dozens of 'em, falling off the Canal Street dock-kids. mostly." Then he looked at her. "I got "I got my pay-check yesterday; I 've been saving 'em all, too, mostly-more money than I 've ever had in my life."

"That 's fine," she commented. "You should keep on, and you'll have that dear old mother of yours the happiest woman in the world."

He looked at her full with his fire-lit eyes, leaning slightly forward, not as though to demand, but to take.

"There are other women," he said, "beside the old lady." There was no hesitation in his voice, which, indeed, ended with a snap.

For an instant she lowered her eyes, but there was no thrill now; instead a great wave of cold reason swept over her, an intuitive prescience.

"Your mother 's first always, John. Don't forget that when you have done everything to make her happy, and pay her back for what she went through with your father; then you can think of other women."

She rattled on, desperately running from subject to subject, drawing further and further away from the abyss which had been yawning to engulf her.

Mechler returned to quarters soon after, not knowing whither he had been led, but filled with the irritating knowledge that he had not said the part he had laid out, while not understanding why he had n't. After that he did n't visit Molly Gleason for two weeks. When he did, he met her going out with Cullen. What with talking and laughing and pulling on her gloves, she did n't see Mechler until they were abreast. Then she nodded brightly, greeted him over her shoulder, and went on.

That night, after Cullen had brought her home and they stood talking on the door-step, he took her hands and held them, and told her of his love, and then he clasped her in his arms right there on the sidewalk in the soft darkness of the spring. After that they sat on the step hand in hand as they had often done when they were boy and girl-sat in silence, listening to the sounds of the retiring city, watching light after light as it vanished. along the street. She stood awhile after he had gone, drinking in the pleasant west breeze from gardens across the river in New Jersey, a far-away smile upon her face, as of one who has beheld something beautiful. A fire-truck went reeling and plunging up the near-by avenue into the heart of the night, the clangor of it sending echoes through the street long after it had passed. Mechler probably was on it. She thought of him, and her smile deepened.

Yes, she would continue to be his friend, to follow his career with that proprietary interest which was her right, and of course he would understand, as indeed he must have understood throughout, the utter gulf which lay between that and anything different. Its impassable width and illimita

ble depth of course he had understood. So now there were no misgivings, no regrets. Mechler, curiously enough, came the next evening on his way to a theater detail, and Cullen, who was talking to her on the porch, left abruptly without as much as a nod to the fireman.

"What's the matter with that guy, anyway?" he growled, lowering at the retreating form.

She laughed nervously. She had been wondering how to tell him. Here was the opportunity.

"Tom always is jealous when I even look at any other man. Is n't he silly!" Mechler stared at her.

"Why should he be jealous?" Again she laughed, flushing as her eyes met his.

"Why," she said, "I thought you knew. We 're engaged to be married."

Something of a dignity she had never marked in him before came into his whole bearing and into his voice.

"No," he said softly, "I did n't know." He paused, and then, looking at her straight, said in a tone she did not know he possessed: "Well, Molly, that's all right. You understand what I mean when I say that's all right?" He looked at her face, expressionless now, and added, "You know what I mean, don't you?" Then he added: "You 've been a good girl to me, Molly. You'll never regret it. That's what I mean." He turned away.

"But, Jack," she cried as he started down the steps, "I-"

His gesture interrupted her.

"Don't say anything more, Molly. What's the use? Don't you worry. I'm going up to the Ariel Theater now, where they 're having a brand-new burlesque; there's always a lot of fun behind the scenes. Don't fret a bit; it 's all right."

Thus he walked away, while, to her amazement, not at all understanding, she broke down.

"O God, O Mary," she prayed, "don't let me be the cause of sending a soul I tried to save to hell!"

Mechler, as he walked away, realized at every step, in ever-increasing degree, the magnitude of the ruin which had piled about and over him. His instincts were not altogether refined, but certainly he was suffering now more deeply and feeling more keenly than ever before in his

life. It was as though the collapse of a vague dream had served to formulate in his mind a living conception of that dream, every detail clearly defined, presenting in its entirety thrilling realization of that which had gone beyond his grasp. And thus knowing, something in his nature found vent, something submerged, which moved him with untold force. While he did not know it, the love which had developed in him for this girl was the biggest thing his soul had ever known, and so, in the killing of it, was touched something that lay at the very core of his being. So there was no impulse to get drunk or to pick a fight with some one. It was an emotion that, while not understood, did not frighten him; indeed, it filled him with something akin to a state of absolute peace. He went his way, and his soul was free, far from the verge of that region whence Molly Gleason had prayed that he be delivered.

That his mood was not a passing one became evident as the days went on. As though the first vitally deep shock he had ever received had altered the entire trend of his nature and instincts, so he was translated, as it seemed, into a new personality. It was marked in a minor way in resplendent additions to his civilian wardrobe, in jewelry purchased by instalments from gentlemen of Maiden Lane, who find lucrative trade at fire-houses, in his self-conscious demeanor before the young women of the Globe Theater Burlesque, as well as in the persons of the other sex in general.

He had suffered a hard blow, had been struck deeply, and he was interested in subjective probings designed to keep his wound from healing and the pain from subsiding. But more specially was this change to be noted in his professional career. In all fire-companies there are devilmay-care fellows not given to counting the cost of things, and there are those whose imagination casts always ahead, and causes them to hang back when some deed involving extra hazard is to be done. Upon the first a captain comes to depend; they are the strength of his elbow, and there he always finds them. Of such as these Mechler had been preeminently; but now in some subtle way his captain had divined he was so no longer. Not that any element of cowardice was to be de