CHAPTER VIII.
A LAST REVOLT It proved a restless day, and a sufficiently unpleasant one, for Mr.
Hampton.

For a number of years he had been diligently training himself in the school of cynicism, endeavoring to persuade himself that he did not in the least care what others thought, nor how his own career ended; impelling himself to constant recklessness in life and thought.
He had thus successfully built up a wall between the present and that past which long haunted his lonely moments, and had finally decided that it was hermetically sealed.

Yet now, this odd chit of a girl, this waif whom he had plucked from the jaws of death, had overturned this carefully constructed barrier as if it had been originally built of mere cardboard, and he was compelled again to see himself, loathe himself, just as he had in those past years.
Everything had been changed by her sudden entrance into his life, everything except those unfortunate conditions which still bound him helpless.

He looked upon the world no longer through his cool, gray eyes, but out of her darker ones, and the prospect appeared gloomy enough.

He thought it all over again and again, dwelling in reawakened memory upon details long hidden within the secret recesses of his brain, yet so little came from this searching survey that the result left him no plan for the future.