BENJAMIN McNEIL MURDOCK
he did not see her. She even returned, on the pretext of having forgotten her gloves, and stared at him as she came in, and glanced back over her shoulder as she went out; but he continued absorbed in his newspaper. After she had disappeared he looked up quickly, as if some one had spoken to him; and he gazed around him bewildered at the tables near. No one was even noticing him. He paid his check and wandered out. And next day he drew two thousand dollars of his savings from the bank and bought Bethlehem Steel.
Throughout that fall and winter the war orders from abroad kept his steel stocks rising, and he followed them cautiously, gambling on a margin, halving his winnings, and adding a thousand dollars at a time to his savings account. By the following May he had thirty thousand dollars in sight, and this, he figured, was enough for him to live on. He sold all his stocks. He resigned his position at Perry-Felton's. He packed his books in barrels and all his clothes in his suit-case. And, telling his landlady that he was going on a holiday, he walked out of the apartment-house at eight o'clock at night—empty-handed, but with five hundred dollars in his pocket—and turned toward the Hudson River and the Jersey ferry.
13
By ten o'clock he was passing the City Hall in Newark. By midnight he was lying under a tree
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