Thus had the door closed upon Hilmer and his crippled gaoler. Already Helen Starratt had gained the street corner. Fred was seized with an impulse to overtake her, but it had died as quickly. There was nothing he could offer ... not even a lodging for the night. Instead he had turned and walked briskly in an opposite direction.
As he drew nearer town the cries of the newsboys grew more insistent ... so insistent that Fred bought a paper. By this time they had cleared away the charred wreckage of Storch's shack, discovering the secret which its ruins had concealed. He found himself wondering how soon they would link him with the still-born plot which had achieved so much tragedy in spite of its miscarriage. Of Ginger there was little trace. She had been caught up in a winding sheet of flame, a chariot of fire which had swept clean her pitiful and outraged body... Again he saw her face, wistful in the glare of that portentous noon, framed by the outline of Storch's doorway, heard himself call her name in agony, and woke to find only a memory answering him. And there came to him a realization of the terrible beauty of that moment which had released her spirit in white-heated transfiguration.
A sudden pity for the living began to well up within him ... for Hilmer in the relentless grip of the harpy who would tear at his content with her scrawny fingers ... for Mrs. Hilmer, condemned to feed to the end upon the bitter fruits of hatred ... for his wife, drifting to a pallid fate made up of petty adjustments and compromises. Yes ... he found himself pitying Helen Starratt most of all. Because he had a feeling that she would go on to the end cloaking her primitive impulses in a curious covering of self-deception. She would never understand ... never! She would always be restless, straining at the conventions, but unable or unwilling to pay the price of full freedom. And her remaining days would be spent in a futile pulling at the chains which her own cowardice had forged. She would not even have the memory of bitter-sweet delights.
He came from these musings to discover that his feet had strayed instinctively to the old garden which provoked the memory of his father and mother. But he found it destroyed utterly ... its prim beds swept aside to make way for a huge apartment house. The last intangible link which had bound him to his old life had been destroyed.