K

The Project Gutenberg EBook of K, by Mary Roberts Rinehart

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Title: K

Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart

Release Date: February, 2006 [EBook #9931] Posting Date: June 16, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK K ***

Produced by David Brannan

K

By Mary Roberts Rinehart

CHAPTER I

The Street stretched away north and south in two lines of ancient houses that seemed to meet in the distance. The man found it infinitely inviting. It had the well-worn look of an old coat, shabby but comfortable. The thought of coming there to live pleased him. Surely here would be peace—long evenings in which to read, quiet nights in which to sleep and forget. It was an impression of home, really, that it gave. The man did not know that, or care particularly. He had been wandering about a long time—not in years, for he was less than thirty. But it seemed a very long time.

At the little house no one had seemed to think about references. He could have given one or two, of a sort. He had gone to considerable trouble to get them; and now, not to have them asked for—

There was a house across and a little way down the Street, with a card in the window that said: “Meals, twenty-five cents.” Evidently the midday meal was over; men who looked like clerks and small shopkeepers were hurrying away. The Nottingham curtains were pinned back, and just inside the window a throaty barytone was singing:

“Home is the hunter, home from the hill: And the sailor, home from sea.”

Across the Street, the man smiled grimly—Home!

For perhaps an hour Joe Drummond had been wandering up and down the Street. His straw hat was set on the back of his head, for the evening was warm; his slender shoulders, squared and resolute at eight, by nine had taken on a disconsolate droop. Under a street lamp he consulted his watch, but even without that he knew what the hour was. Prayer meeting at the corner church was over; boys of his own age were ranging themselves along the curb, waiting for the girl of the moment. When she came, a youth would appear miraculously beside her, and the world-old pairing off would have taken place.

The Street emptied. The boy wiped the warm band of his hat and slapped it on his head again. She was always treating him like this—keeping him hanging about, and then coming out, perfectly calm and certain that he would still be waiting. By George, he’d fool her, for once: he’d go away, and let her worry. She WOULD worry. She hated to hurt anyone. Ah!

Across the Street, under an old ailanthus tree, was the house he watched, a small brick, with shallow wooden steps and—curious architecture of Middle West sixties—a wooden cellar door beside the steps.

In some curious way it preserved an air of distinction among its more pretentious neighbors, much as a very old lady may now and then lend tone to a smart gathering. On either side of it, the taller houses had an appearance of protection rather than of patronage. It was a matter of self-respect, perhaps. No windows on the Street were so spotlessly curtained, no doormat so accurately placed, no “yard” in the rear so tidy with morning-glory vines over the whitewashed fence.

The June moon had risen, sending broken shafts of white light through the ailanthus to the house door. When the girl came at last, she stepped out into a world of soft lights and wavering shadows, fragrant with tree blossoms not yet overpowering, hushed of its daylight sounds of playing children and moving traffic.

The house had been warm. Her brown hair lay moist on her forehead, her thin white dress was turned in at the throat. She stood on the steps, the door closed behind her, and threw out her arms in a swift gesture to the cool air. The moonlight clothed her as with a garment. From across the Street the boy watched her with adoring, humble eyes. All his courage was for those hours when he was not with her.

“Hello, Joe.”

“Hello, Sidney.”

He crossed over, emerging out of the shadows into her enveloping radiance. His ardent young eyes worshiped her as he stood on the pavement.

“I’m late. I was taking out bastings for mother.”

“Oh, that’s all right.”

Sidney sat down on the doorstep, and the boy dropped at her feet.

“I thought of going to prayer meeting, but mother was tired. Was Christine there?”

“Yes; Palmer Howe took her home.”

He was at his ease now. He had discarded his hat, and lay back on his elbows, ostensibly to look at the moon. Actually his brown eyes rested on the face of the girl above him. He was very happy. “He’s crazy about Chris. She’s good-looking, but she’s not my sort.”

“Pray, what IS your sort?”

“You.”

She laughed softly. “You’re a goose, Joe!”

She settled herself more comfortably on the doorstep and drew along breath.

“How tired I am! Oh—I haven’t told you. We’ve taken a roomer!”

“A what?”

“A roomer.” She was half apologetic. The Street did not approve of roomers. “It will help with the rent. It’s my doing, really. Mother is scandalized.”

“A woman?”

“A man.”

“What sort of man?”

“How do I know? He is coming tonight. I’ll tell you in a week.”

Joe was sitting bolt upright now, a little white.

“Is he young?”

“He’s a good bit older than you, but that’s not saying he’s old.”

Joe was twenty-one, and sensitive of his youth.

“He’ll be crazy about you in two days.”

She broke into delighted laughter.

“I’ll not fall in love with him—you can be certain of that. He is tall and very solemn. His hair is quite gray over his ears.”

Joe cheered.

“What’s his name?”

“K. Le Moyne.”

“K.?”

“That’s what he said.”

Interest in the roomer died away. The boy fell into the ecstasy of content that always came with Sidney’s presence. His inarticulate young soul was swelling with thoughts that he did not know how to put into words. It was easy enough to plan conversations with Sidney when he was away from her. But, at her feet, with her soft skirts touching him as she moved, her eager face turned to him, he was miserably speechless.

Unexpectedly, Sidney yawned. He was outraged.

“If you’re sleepy—”

“Don’t be silly. I love having you. I sat up late last night, reading. I wonder what you think of this: one of the characters in the book I was reading says that every man who—who cares for a woman leaves his mark on her! I suppose she tries to become what he thinks she is, for the time anyhow, and is never just her old self again.”

She said “cares for” instead of “loves.” It is one of the traditions of youth to avoid the direct issue in life’s greatest game. Perhaps “love” is left to the fervent vocabulary of the lover. Certainly, as if treading on dangerous ground, Sidney avoided it.

“Every man! How many men are supposed to care for a woman, anyhow?”

“Well, there’s the boy who—likes her when they’re both young.”

A bit of innocent mischief this, but Joe straightened.

“Then they both outgrow that foolishness. After that there are usually two rivals, and she marries one of them—that’s three. And—”

“Why do they always outgrow that foolishness?” His voice was unsteady.

“Oh, I don’t know. One’s ideas change. Anyhow, I’m only telling you what the book said.”

“It’s a silly book.”

“I don’t believe it’s true,” she confessed. “When I got started I just read on. I was curious.”

More eager than curious, had she only known. She was fairly vibrant with the zest of living. Sitting on the steps of the little brick house, her busy mind was carrying her on to where, beyond the Street, with its dingy lamps and blossoming ailanthus, lay the world that was some day to lie to her hand. Not ambition called her, but life.

The boy was different. Where her future lay visualized before her, heroic deeds, great ambitions, wide charity, he planned years with her, selfish, contented years. As different as smug, satisfied summer from visionary, palpitating spring, he was for her—but she was for all the world.

By shifting his position his lips came close to her bare young arm. It tempted him.

“Don’t read that nonsense,” he said, his eyes on the arm. “And—I’ll never outgrow my foolishness about you, Sidney.”

Then, because he could not help it, he bent over and kissed her arm.

She was just eighteen, and Joe’s devotion was very pleasant. She thrilled to the touch of his lips on her flesh; but she drew her arm away.

“Please—I don’t like that sort of thing.”

“Why not?” His voice was husky.

“It isn’t right. Besides, the neighbors are always looking out the windows.”

The drop from her high standard of right and wrong to the neighbors’ curiosity appealed suddenly to her sense of humor. She threw back her head and laughed. He joined her, after an uncomfortable moment. But he was very much in earnest. He sat, bent forward, turning his new straw hat in his hands.

“I guess you know how I feel. Some of the fellows have crushes on girls and get over them. I’m not like that. Since the first day I saw you I’ve never looked at another girl. Books can say what they like: there are people like that, and I’m one of them.”

There was a touch of dogged pathos in his voice. He was that sort, and Sidney knew it. Fidelity and tenderness—those would be hers if she married him. He would always be there when she wanted him, looking at her with loving eyes, a trifle wistful sometimes because of his lack of those very qualities he so admired in her—her wit, her resourcefulness, her humor. But he would be there, not strong, perhaps, but always loyal.

“I thought, perhaps,” said Joe, growing red and white, and talking to the hat, “that some day, when we’re older, you—you might be willing to marry me, Sid. I’d be awfully good to you.”

It hurt her to say no. Indeed, she could not bring herself to say it. In all her short life she had never willfully inflicted a wound. And because she was young, and did not realize that there is a short cruelty, like the surgeon’s, that is mercy in the end, she temporized.

“There is such a lot of time before we need think of such things! Can’t we just go on the way we are?”

“I’m not very happy the way we are.”

“Why, Joe!”

“Well, I’m not”—doggedly. “You’re pretty and attractive. When I see a fellow staring at you, and I’d like to smash his face for him, I haven’t the right.”

“And a precious good thing for you that you haven’t!” cried Sidney, rather shocked.

There was silence for a moment between them. Sidney, to tell the truth, was obsessed by a vision of Joe, young and hot-eyed, being haled to the police station by virtue of his betrothal responsibilities. The boy was vacillating between relief at having spoken and a heaviness of spirit that came from Sidney’s lack of enthusiastic response.

“Well, what do you think about it?”

“If you are asking me to give you permission to waylay and assault every man who dares to look at me—”

“I guess this is all a joke to you.”

She leaned over and put a tender hand on his arm.

“I don’t want to hurt you; but, Joe, I don’t want to be engaged yet. I don’t want to think about marrying. There’s such a lot to do in the world first. There’s such a lot to see and be.”

“Where?” he demanded bitterly. “Here on this Street? Do you want more time to pull bastings for your mother? Or to slave for your Aunt Harriet? Or to run up and down stairs, carrying towels to roomers? Marry me and let me take care of you.”

Once again her dangerous sense of humor threatened her. He looked so boyish, sitting there with the moonlight on his bright hair, so inadequate to carry out his magnificent offer. Two or three of the star blossoms from the tree had fallen all his head. She lifted them carefully away.

“Let me take care of myself for a while. I’ve never lived my own life. You know what I mean. I’m not unhappy; but I want to do something. And some day I shall,—not anything big; I know. I can’t do that,—but something useful. Then, after years and years, if you still want me, I’ll come back to you.”

“How soon?”

“How can I know that now? But it will be a long time.”

He drew a long breath and got up. All the joy had gone out of the summer night for him, poor lad. He glanced down the Street, where Palmer Howe had gone home happily with Sidney’s friend Christine. Palmer would always know how he stood with Christine. She would never talk about doing things, or being things. Either she would marry Palmer or she would not. But Sidney was not like that. A fellow did not even caress her easily. When he had only kissed her arm—He trembled a little at the memory.

“I shall always want you,” he said. “Only—you will never come back.”

It had not occurred to either of them that this coming back, so tragically considered, was dependent on an entirely problematical going away. Nothing, that early summer night, seemed more unlikely than that Sidney would ever be free to live her own life. The Street, stretching away to the north and to the south in two lines of houses that seemed to meet in the distance, hemmed her in. She had been born in the little brick house, and, as she was of it, so it was of her. Her hands had smoothed and painted the pine floors; her hands had put up the twine on which the morning-glories in the yard covered the fences; had, indeed, with what agonies of slacking lime and adding blueing, whitewashed the fence itself!

“She’s capable,” Aunt Harriet had grumblingly admitted, watching from her sewing-machine Sidney’s strong young arms at this humble spring task.

“She’s wonderful!” her mother had said, as she bent over her hand work. She was not strong enough to run the sewing-machine.

So Joe Drummond stood on the pavement and saw his dream of taking Sidney in his arms fade into an indefinite futurity.

“I’m not going to give you up,” he said doggedly. “When you come back, I’ll be waiting.”

The shock being over, and things only postponed, he dramatized his grief a trifle, thrust his hands savagely into his pockets, and scowled down the Street. In the line of his vision, his quick eye caught a tiny moving shadow, lost it, found it again.

“Great Scott! There goes Reginald!” he cried, and ran after the shadow. “Watch for the McKees’ cat!”

Sidney was running by that time; they were gaining. Their quarry, a four-inch chipmunk, hesitated, gave a protesting squeak, and was caught in Sidney’s hand.

“You wretch!” she cried. “You miserable little beast—with cats everywhere, and not a nut for miles!”

“That reminds me,”—Joe put a hand into his pocket,—“I brought some chestnuts for him, and forgot them. Here.”

Reginald’s escape had rather knocked the tragedy out of the evening. True, Sidney would not marry him for years, but she had practically promised to sometime. And when one is twenty-one, and it is a summer night, and life stretches eternities ahead, what are a few years more or less?

Sidney was holding the tiny squirrel in warm, protecting hands. She smiled up at the boy.

“Good-night, Joe.”

“Good-night. I say, Sidney, it’s more than half an engagement. Won’t you kiss me good-night?”

She hesitated, flushed and palpitating. Kisses were rare in the staid little household to which she belonged.

“I—I think not.”

“Please! I’m not very happy, and it will be something to remember.”

Perhaps, after all, Sidney’s first kiss would have gone without her heart,—which was a thing she had determined would never happen,—gone out of sheer pity. But a tall figure loomed out of the shadows and approached with quick strides.

“The roomer!” cried Sidney, and backed away.

“Damn the roomer!”

Poor Joe, with the summer evening quite spoiled, with no caress to remember, and with a potential rival who possessed both the years and the inches he lacked, coming up the Street!

The roomer advanced steadily. When he reached the doorstep, Sidney was demurely seated and quite alone. The roomer, who had walked fast, stopped and took off his hat. He looked very warm. He carried a suitcase, which was as it should be. The men of the Street always carried their own luggage, except the younger Wilson across the way. His tastes were known to be luxurious.

“Hot, isn’t it?” Sidney inquired, after a formal greeting. She indicated the place on the step just vacated by Joe. “You’d better cool off out here. The house is like an oven. I think I should have warned you of that before you took the room. These little houses with low roofs are fearfully hot.”

The new roomer hesitated. The steps were very low, and he was tall. Besides, he did not care to establish any relations with the people in the house. Long evenings in which to read, quiet nights in which to sleep and forget—these were the things he had come for.

But Sidney had moved over and was smiling up at him. He folded up awkwardly on the low step. He seemed much too big for the house. Sidney had a panicky thought of the little room upstairs.

“I don’t mind heat. I—I suppose I don’t think about it,” said the roomer, rather surprised at himself.

Reginald, having finished his chestnut, squeaked for another. The roomer started.

“Just Reginald—my ground-squirrel.” Sidney was skinning a nut with her strong white teeth. “That’s another thing I should have told you. I’m afraid you’ll be sorry you took the room.”

The roomer smiled in the shadow.

“I’m beginning to think that YOU are sorry.”

She was all anxiety to reassure him:—

“It’s because of Reginald. He lives under my—under your bureau. He’s really not troublesome; but he’s building a nest under the bureau, and if you don’t know about him, it’s rather unsettling to see a paper pattern from the sewing-room, or a piece of cloth, moving across the floor.”

Mr. Le Moyne thought it might be very interesting. “Although, if there’s nest-building going on, isn’t it—er—possible that Reginald is a lady ground-squirrel?”

Sidney was rather distressed, and, seeing this, he hastened to add that, for all he knew, all ground-squirrels built nests, regardless of sex. As a matter of fact, it developed that he knew nothing whatever of ground-squirrels. Sidney was relieved. She chatted gayly of the tiny creature—of his rescue in the woods from a crowd of little boys, of his restoration to health and spirits, and of her expectation, when he was quite strong, of taking him to the woods and freeing him.

Le Moyne, listening attentively, began to be interested. His quick mind had grasped the fact that it was the girl’s bedroom he had taken. Other things he had gathered that afternoon from the humming sewing-machine, from Sidney’s businesslike way of renting the little room, from the glimpse of a woman in a sunny window, bent over a needle. Genteel poverty was what it meant, and more—the constant drain of disheartened, middle-aged women on the youth and courage of the girl beside him.

K. Le Moyne, who was living his own tragedy those days, what with poverty and other things, sat on the doorstep while Sidney talked, and swore a quiet oath to be no further weight on the girl’s buoyant spirit. And, since determining on a virtue is halfway to gaining it, his voice lost its perfunctory note. He had no intention of letting the Street encroach on him. He had built up a wall between himself and the rest of the world, and he would not scale it. But he held no grudge against it. Let others get what they could out of living.

Sidney, suddenly practical, broke in on his thoughts:—

“Where are you going to get your meals?”

“I hadn’t thought about it. I can stop in somewhere on my way downtown. I work in the gas office—I don’t believe I told you. It’s rather haphazard—not the gas office, but the eating. However, it’s convenient.”

“It’s very bad for you,” said Sidney, with decision. “It leads to slovenly habits, such as going without when you’re in a hurry, and that sort of thing. The only thing is to have some one expecting you at a certain time.”

“It sounds like marriage.” He was lazily amused.

“It sounds like Mrs. McKee’s boarding-house at the corner. Twenty-one meals for five dollars, and a ticket to punch. Tillie, the dining-room girl, punches for every meal you get. If you miss any meals, your ticket is good until it is punched. But Mrs. McKee doesn’t like it if you miss.”

“Mrs. McKee for me,” said Le Moyne. “I daresay, if I know that—er—Tillie is waiting with the punch, I’ll be fairly regular to my meals.”

It was growing late. The Street, which mistrusted night air, even on a hot summer evening, was closing its windows. Reginald, having eaten his fill, had cuddled in the warm hollow of Sidney’s lap, and slept. By shifting his position, the man was able to see the girl’s face. Very lovely it was, he thought. Very pure, almost radiant—and young. From the middle age of his almost thirty years, she was a child. There had been a boy in the shadows when he came up the Street. Of course there would be a boy—a nice, clear-eyed chap—

Sidney was looking at the moon. With that dreamer’s part of her that she had inherited from her dead and gone father, she was quietly worshiping the night. But her busy brain was working, too,—the practical brain that she had got from her mother’s side.

“What about your washing?” she inquired unexpectedly.

K. Le Moyne, who had built a wall between himself and the world, had already married her to the youth of the shadows, and was feeling an odd sense of loss.

“Washing?”

“I suppose you’ve been sending things to the laundry, and—what do you do about your stockings?”

“Buy cheap ones and throw ‘em away when they’re worn out.” There seemed to be no reserve with this surprising young person.

“And buttons?”

“Use safety-pins. When they’re closed one can button over them as well as—”

“I think,” said Sidney, “that it is quite time some one took a little care of you. If you will give Katie, our maid, twenty-five cents a week, she’ll do your washing and not tear your things to ribbons. And I’ll mend them.”

Sheer stupefaction was K. Le Moyne’s. After a moment:—

“You’re really rather wonderful, Miss Page. Here am I, lodged, fed, washed, ironed, and mended for seven dollars and seventy-five cents a week!”

“I hope,” said Sidney severely, “that you’ll put what you save in the bank.”

He was still somewhat dazed when he went up the narrow staircase to his swept and garnished room. Never, in all of a life that had been active,—until recently,—had he been so conscious of friendliness and kindly interest. He expanded under it. Some of the tired lines left his face. Under the gas chandelier, he straightened and threw out his arms. Then he reached down into his coat pocket and drew out a wide-awake and suspicious Reginald.

“Good-night, Reggie!” he said. “Good-night, old top!” He hardly recognized his own voice. It was quite cheerful, although the little room was hot, and although, when he stood, he had a perilous feeling that the ceiling was close above. He deposited Reginald carefully on the floor in front of the bureau, and the squirrel, after eyeing him, retreated to its nest.

It was late when K. Le Moyne retired to bed. Wrapped in a paper and securely tied for the morning’s disposal, was considerable masculine underclothing, ragged and buttonless. Not for worlds would he have had Sidney discover his threadbare inner condition. “New underwear for yours tomorrow, K. Le Moyne,” he said to himself, as he unknotted his cravat. “New underwear, and something besides K. for a first name.”

He pondered over that for a time, taking off his shoes slowly and thinking hard. “Kenneth, King, Kerr—” None of them appealed to him. And, after all, what did it matter? The old heaviness came over him.

He dropped a shoe, and Reginald, who had gained enough courage to emerge and sit upright on the fender, fell over backward.

Sidney did not sleep much that night. She lay awake, gazing into the scented darkness, her arms under her head. Love had come into her life at last. A man—only Joe, of course, but it was not the boy himself, but what he stood for, that thrilled her had asked her to be his wife.

In her little back room, with the sweetness of the tree blossoms stealing through the open window, Sidney faced the great mystery of life and love, and flung out warm young arms. Joe would be thinking of her now, as she thought of him. Or would he have gone to sleep, secure in her half promise? Did he really love her?

The desire to be loved! There was coming to Sidney a time when love would mean, not receiving, but giving—the divine fire instead of the pale flame of youth. At last she slept.

A night breeze came through the windows and spread coolness through the little house. The ailanthus tree waved in the moonlight and sent sprawling shadows over the wall of K. Le Moyne’s bedroom. In the yard the leaves of the morning-glory vines quivered as if under the touch of a friendly hand.

K. Le Moyne slept diagonally in his bed, being very long. In sleep the lines were smoothed out of his face. He looked like a tired, overgrown boy. And while he slept the ground-squirrel ravaged the pockets of his shabby coat.

CHAPTER II

Sidney could not remember when her Aunt Harriet had not sat at the table. It was one of her earliest disillusionments to learn that Aunt Harriet lived with them, not because she wished to, but because Sidney’s father had borrowed her small patrimony and she was “boarding it out.” Eighteen years she had “boarded it out.” Sidney had been born and grown to girlhood; the dreamer father had gone to his grave, with valuable patents lost for lack of money to renew them—gone with his faith in himself destroyed, but with his faith in the world undiminished: for he left his wife and daughter without a dollar of life insurance.

Harriet Kennedy had voiced her own view of the matter, the after the funeral, to one of the neighbors:—

“He left no insurance. Why should he bother? He left me.”

To the little widow, her sister, she had been no less bitter, and more explicit.

“It looks to me, Anna,” she said, “as if by borrowing everything I had George had bought me, body and soul, for the rest of my natural life. I’ll stay now until Sidney is able to take hold. Then I’m going to live my own life. It will be a little late, but the Kennedys live a long time.”

The day of Harriet’s leaving had seemed far away to Anna Page. Sidney was still her baby, a pretty, rather leggy girl, in her first year at the High School, prone to saunter home with three or four knickerbockered boys in her train, reading “The Duchess” stealthily, and begging for longer dresses. She had given up her dolls, but she still made clothes for them out of scraps from Harriet’s sewing-room. In the parlance of the Street, Harriet “sewed”—and sewed well.

She had taken Anna into business with her, but the burden of the partnership had always been on Harriet. To give her credit, she had not complained. She was past forty by that time, and her youth had slipped by in that back room with its dingy wallpaper covered with paper patterns.

On the day after the arrival of the roomer, Harriet Kennedy came down to breakfast a little late. Katie, the general housework girl, had tied a small white apron over her generous gingham one, and was serving breakfast. From the kitchen came the dump of an iron, and cheerful singing. Sidney was ironing napkins. Mrs. Page, who had taken advantage of Harriet’s tardiness to read the obituary column in the morning paper, dropped it.

But Harriet did not sit down. It was her custom to jerk her chair out and drop into it, as if she grudged every hour spent on food. Sidney, not hearing the jerk, paused with her iron in air.

“Sidney.”

“Yes, Aunt Harriet.”

“Will you come in, please?”

Katie took the iron from her.

“You go. She’s all dressed up, and she doesn’t want any coffee.”

So Sidney went in. It was to her that Harriet made her speech:—

“Sidney, when your father died, I promised to look after both you and your mother until you were able to take care of yourself. That was five years ago. Of course, even before that I had helped to support you.”

“If you would only have your coffee, Harriet!”

Mrs. Page sat with her hand on the handle of the old silver-plated coffee-pot. Harriet ignored her.

“You are a young woman now. You have health and energy, and you have youth, which I haven’t. I’m past forty. In the next twenty years, at the outside, I’ve got not only to support myself, but to save something to keep me after that, if I live. I’ll probably live to be ninety. I don’t want to live forever, but I’ve always played in hard luck.”

Sidney returned her gaze steadily.

“I see. Well, Aunt Harriet, you’re quite right. You’ve been a saint to us, but if you want to go away—”

“Harriet!” wailed Mrs. Page, “you’re not thinking—”

“Please, mother.”

Harriet’s eyes softened as she looked at the girl

“We can manage,” said Sidney quietly. “We’ll miss you, but it’s time we learned to depend on ourselves.”

After that, in a torrent, came Harriet’s declaration of independence. And, mixed in with its pathetic jumble of recriminations, hostility to her sister’s dead husband, and resentment for her lost years, came poor Harriet’s hopes and ambitions, the tragic plea of a woman who must substitute for the optimism and energy of youth the grim determination of middle age.

“I can do good work,” she finished. “I’m full of ideas, if I could get a chance to work them out. But there’s no chance here. There isn’t a woman on the Street who knows real clothes when she sees them. They don’t even know how to wear their corsets. They send me bundles of hideous stuff, with needles and shields and imitation silk for lining, and when I turn out something worth while out of the mess they think the dress is queer!”

Mrs. Page could not get back of Harriet’s revolt to its cause. To her, Harriet was not an artist pleading for her art; she was a sister and a bread-winner deserting her trust.

“I’m sure,” she said stiffly, “we paid you back every cent we borrowed. If you stayed here after George died, it was because you offered to.”

Her chin worked. She fumbled for the handkerchief at her belt. But Sidney went around the table and flung a young arm over her aunt’s shoulders.

“Why didn’t you say all that a year ago? We’ve been selfish, but we’re not as bad as you think. And if any one in this world is entitled to success you are. Of course we’ll manage.”

Harriet’s iron repression almost gave way. She covered her emotion with details:—

“Mrs. Lorenz is going to let me make Christine some things, and if they’re all right I may make her trousseau.”

“Trousseau—for Christine!”

“She’s not engaged, but her mother says it’s only a matter of a short time. I’m going to take two rooms in the business part of town, and put a couch in the backroom to sleep on.”

Sidney’s mind flew to Christine and her bright future, to a trousseau bought with the Lorenz money, to Christine settled down, a married woman, with Palmer Howe. She came back with an effort. Harriet had two triangular red spots in her sallow cheeks.

“I can get a few good models—that’s the only way to start. And if you care to do hand work for me, Anna, I’ll send it to you, and pay you the regular rates. There isn’t the call for it there used to be, but just a touch gives dash.”

All of Mrs. Page’s grievances had worked their way to the surface. Sidney and Harriet had made her world, such as it was, and her world was in revolt. She flung out her hands.

“I suppose I must do something. With you leaving, and Sidney renting her room and sleeping on a folding-bed in the sewing-room, everything seems upside down. I never thought I should live to see strange men running in and out of this house and carrying latch-keys.”

This in reference to Le Moyne, whose tall figure had made a hurried exit some time before.

Nothing could have symbolized Harriet’s revolt more thoroughly than her going upstairs after a hurried breakfast, and putting on her hat and coat. She had heard of rooms, she said, and there was nothing urgent in the work-room. Her eyes were brighter already as she went out. Sidney, kissing her in the hall and wishing her luck, realized suddenly what a burden she and her mother must have been for the last few years. She threw her head up proudly. They would never be a burden again—never, as long as she had strength and health!

By evening Mrs. Page had worked herself into a state bordering on hysteria. Harriet was out most of the day. She came in at three o’clock, and Katie gave her a cup of tea. At the news of her sister’s condition, she merely shrugged her shoulders.

“She’ll not die, Katie,” she said calmly. “But see that Miss Sidney eats something, and if she is worried tell her I said to get Dr. Ed.”

Very significant of Harriet’s altered outlook was this casual summoning of the Street’s family doctor. She was already dealing in larger figures. A sort of recklessness had come over her since the morning. Already she was learning that peace of mind is essential to successful endeavor. Somewhere Harriet had read a quotation from a Persian poet; she could not remember it, but its sense had stayed with her: “What though we spill a few grains of corn, or drops of oil from the cruse? These be the price of peace.”

So Harriet, having spilled oil from her cruse in the shape of Dr. Ed, departed blithely. The recklessness of pure adventure was in her blood. She had taken rooms at a rental that she determinedly put out of her mind, and she was on her way to buy furniture. No pirate, fitting out a ship for the highways of the sea, ever experienced more guilty and delightful excitement.

The afternoon dragged away. Dr. Ed was out “on a case” and might not be in until evening. Sidney sat in the darkened room and waved a fan over her mother’s rigid form.

At half after five, Johnny Rosenfeld from the alley, who worked for a florist after school, brought a box of roses to Sidney, and departed grinning impishly. He knew Joe, had seen him in the store. Soon the alley knew that Sidney had received a dozen Killarney roses at three dollars and a half, and was probably engaged to Joe Drummond.

“Dr. Ed,” said Sidney, as he followed her down the stairs, “can you spare the time to talk to me a little while?”

Perhaps the elder Wilson had a quick vision of the crowded office waiting across the Street; but his reply was prompt:

“Any amount of time.”

Sidney led the way into the small parlor, where Joe’s roses, refused by the petulant invalid upstairs, bloomed alone.

“First of all,” said Sidney, “did you mean what you said upstairs?”

Dr. Ed thought quickly.

“Of course; but what?”

“You said I was a born nurse.”

The Street was very fond of Dr. Ed. It did not always approve of him. It said—which was perfectly true—that he had sacrificed himself to his brother’s career: that, for the sake of that brilliant young surgeon, Dr. Ed had done without wife and children; that to send him abroad he had saved and skimped; that he still went shabby and drove the old buggy, while Max drove about in an automobile coupe. Sidney, not at all of the stuff martyrs are made of, sat in the scented parlor and, remembering all this, was ashamed of her rebellion.

“I’m going into a hospital,” said Sidney.

Dr. Ed waited. He liked to have all the symptoms before he made a diagnosis or ventured an opinion. So Sidney, trying to be cheerful, and quite unconscious of the anxiety in her voice, told her story.

“It’s fearfully hard work, of course,” he commented, when she had finished.

“So is anything worth while. Look at the way you work!”

Dr. Ed rose and wandered around the room.

“You’re too young.”

“I’ll get older.”

“I don’t think I like the idea,” he said at last. “It’s splendid work for an older woman. But it’s life, child—life in the raw. As we get along in years we lose our illusions—some of them, not all, thank God. But for you, at your age, to be brought face to face with things as they are, and not as we want them to be—it seems such an unnecessary sacrifice.”

“Don’t you think,” said Sidney bravely, “that you are a poor person to talk of sacrifice? Haven’t you always, all your life—”

Dr. Ed colored to the roots of his straw-colored hair.

“Certainly not,” he said almost irritably. “Max had genius; I had—ability. That’s different. One real success is better than two halves. Not”—he smiled down at her—“not that I minimize my usefulness. Somebody has to do the hack-work, and, if I do say it myself, I’m a pretty good hack.”

“Very well,” said Sidney. “Then I shall be a hack, too. Of course, I had thought of other things,—my father wanted me to go to college,—but I’m strong and willing. And one thing I must make up my mind to, Dr. Ed; I shall have to support my mother.”

Harriet passed the door on her way in to a belated supper. The man in the parlor had a momentary glimpse of her slender, sagging shoulders, her thin face, her undisguised middle age.

“Yes,” he said, when she was out of hearing. “It’s hard, but I dare say it’s right enough, too. Your aunt ought to have her chance. Only—I wish it didn’t have to be.”

Sidney, left alone, stood in the little parlor beside the roses. She touched them tenderly, absently. Life, which the day before had called her with the beckoning finger of dreams, now reached out grim insistent hands. Life—in the raw.

CHAPTER III

K. Le Moyne had wakened early that first morning in his new quarters. When he sat up and yawned, it was to see his worn cravat disappearing with vigorous tugs under the bureau. He rescued it, gently but firmly.

“You and I, Reginald,” he apostrophized the bureau, “will have to come to an understanding. What I leave on the floor you may have, but what blows down is not to be touched.”

Because he was young and very strong, he wakened to a certain lightness of spirit. The morning sun had always called him to a new day, and the sun was shining. But he grew depressed as he prepared for the office. He told himself savagely, as he put on his shabby clothing, that, having sought for peace and now found it, he was an ass for resenting it. The trouble was, of course, that he came of fighting stock: soldiers and explorers, even a gentleman adventurer or two, had been his forefather. He loathed peace with a deadly loathing.

Having given up everything else, K. Le Moyne had also given up the love of woman. That, of course, is figurative. He had been too busy for women; and now he was too idle. A small part of his brain added figures in the office of a gas company daily, for the sum of two dollars and fifty cents per eight-hour working day. But the real K. Le Moyne that had dreamed dreams, had nothing to do with the figures, but sat somewhere in his head and mocked him as he worked at his task.

“Time’s going by, and here you are!” mocked the real person—who was, of course, not K. Le Moyne at all. “You’re the hell of a lot of use, aren’t you? Two and two are four and three are seven—take off the discount. That’s right. It’s a man’s work, isn’t it?”

“Somebody’s got to do this sort of thing,” protested the small part of his brain that earned the two-fifty per working day. “And it’s a great anaesthetic. He can’t think when he’s doing it. There’s something practical about figures, and—rational.”

He dressed quickly, ascertaining that he had enough money to buy a five-dollar ticket at Mrs. McKee’s; and, having given up the love of woman with other things, he was careful not to look about for Sidney on his way.

He breakfasted at Mrs. McKee’s, and was initiated into the mystery of the ticket punch. The food was rather good, certainly plentiful; and even his squeamish morning appetite could find no fault with the self-respecting tidiness of the place. Tillie proved to be neat and austere. He fancied it would not be pleasant to be very late for one’s meals—in fact, Sidney had hinted as much. Some of the “mealers”—the Street’s name for them—ventured on various small familiarities of speech with Tillie. K. Le Moyne himself was scrupulously polite, but reserved. He was determined not to let the Street encroach on his wretchedness. Because he had come to live there was no reason why it should adopt him. But he was very polite. When the deaf-and-dumb book agent wrote something on a pencil pad and pushed it toward him, he replied in kind.

“We are very glad to welcome you to the McKee family,” was what was written on the pad.

“Very happy, indeed, to be with you,” wrote back Le Moyne—and realized with a sort of shock that he meant it.

The kindly greeting had touched him. The greeting and the breakfast cheered him; also, he had evidently made some headway with Tillie.

“Don’t you want a toothpick?” she asked, as he went out.

In K.‘s previous walk of life there had been no toothpicks; or, if there were any, they were kept, along with the family scandals, in a closet. But nearly a year of buffeting about had taught him many things. He took one, and placed it nonchalantly in his waistcoat pocket, as he had seen the others do.

Tillie, her rush hour over, wandered back into the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee. Mrs. McKee was reweighing the meat order.

“Kind of a nice fellow,” Tillie said, cup to lips—“the new man.”

“Week or meal?”

“Week. He’d be handsome if he wasn’t so grouchy-looking. Lit up some when Mr. Wagner sent him one of his love letters. Rooms over at the Pages’.”

Mrs. McKee drew a long breath and entered the lam stew in a book.

“When I think of Anna Page taking a roomer, it just about knocks me over, Tillie. And where they’ll put him, in that little house—he looked thin, what I saw of him. Seven pounds and a quarter.” This last referred, not to K. Le Moyne, of course, but to the lamb stew.

“Thin as a fiddle-string.”

“Just keep an eye on him, that he gets enough.” Then, rather ashamed of her unbusinesslike methods: “A thin mealer’s a poor advertisement. Do you suppose this is the dog meat or the soup scraps?”

Tillie was a niece of Mrs. Rosenfeld. In such manner was most of the Street and its environs connected; in such wise did its small gossip start at one end and pursue its course down one side and up the other.

“Sidney Page is engaged to Joe Drummond,” announced Tillie. “He sent her a lot of pink roses yesterday.”

There was no malice in her flat statement, no envy. Sidney and she, living in the world of the Street, occupied different spheres. But the very lifelessness in her voice told how remotely such things touched her, and thus was tragic. “Mealers” came and went—small clerks, petty tradesmen, husbands living alone in darkened houses during the summer hegira of wives. Various and catholic was Tillie’s male acquaintance, but compounded of good fellowship only. Once, years before, romance had paraded itself before her in the garb of a traveling nurseryman—had walked by and not come back.

“And Miss Harriet’s going into business for herself. She’s taken rooms downtown; she’s going to be Madame Something or other.”

Now, at last, was Mrs. McKee’s attention caught riveted.

“For the love of mercy! At her age! It’s downright selfish. If she raises her prices she can’t make my new foulard.”

Tillie sat at the table, her faded blue eyes fixed on the back yard, where her aunt, Mrs. Rosenfeld, was hanging out the week’s wash of table linen.

“I don’t know as it’s so selfish,” she reflected. “We’ve only got one life. I guess a body’s got the right to live it.”

Mrs. McKee eyed her suspiciously, but Tillie’s face showed no emotion.

“You don’t ever hear of Schwitter, do you?”

“No; I guess she’s still living.”

Schwitter, the nurseryman, had proved to have a wife in an insane asylum. That was why Tillie’s romance had only paraded itself before her and had gone by.

“You got out of that lucky.”

Tillie rose and tied a gingham apron over her white one.

“I guess so. Only sometimes—”

“I don’t know as it would have been so wrong. He ain’t young, and I ain’t. And we’re not getting any younger. He had nice manners; he’d have been good to me.”

Mrs. McKee’s voice failed her. For a moment she gasped like a fish. Then:

“And him a married man!”

“Well, I’m not going to do it,” Tillie soothed her. “I get to thinking about it sometimes; that’s all. This new fellow made me think of him. He’s got the same nice way about him.”

Aye, the new man had made her think of him, and June, and the lovers who lounged along the Street in the moonlit avenues toward the park and love; even Sidney’s pink roses. Change was in the very air of the Street that June morning. It was in Tillie, making a last clutch at youth, and finding, in this pale flare of dying passion, courage to remember what she had schooled herself to forget; in Harriet asserting her right to live her life; in Sidney, planning with eager eyes a life of service which did not include Joe; in K. Le Moyne, who had built up a wall between himself and the world, and was seeing it demolished by a deaf-and-dumb book agent whose weapon was a pencil pad!

And yet, for a week nothing happened: Joe came in the evenings and sat on the steps with Sidney, his honest heart, in his eyes. She could not bring herself at first to tell him about the hospital. She put it off from day to day. Anna, no longer sulky, accepted wit the childlike faith Sidney’s statement that “they’d get along; she had a splendid scheme,” and took to helping Harriet in her preparations for leaving. Tillie, afraid of her rebellious spirit, went to prayer meeting. And K. Le Moyne, finding his little room hot in the evenings and not wishing to intrude on the two on the doorstep, took to reading his paper in the park, and after twilight to long, rapid walks out into the country. The walks satisfied the craving of his active body for exercise, and tired him so he could sleep. On one such occasion he met Mr. Wagner, and they carried on an animated conversation until it was too dark to see the pad. Even then, it developed that Wagner could write in the dark; and he secured the last word in a long argument by doing this and striking a match for K. to read by.

When K. was sure that the boy had gone, he would turn back toward the Street. Some of the heaviness of his spirit always left him at sight of the little house. Its kindly atmosphere seemed to reach out and envelop him. Within was order and quiet, the fresh-down bed, the tidiness of his ordered garments. There was even affection—Reginald, waiting on the fender for his supper, and regarding him with wary and bright-eyed friendliness.

Life, that had seemed so simple, had grown very complicated for Sidney. There was her mother to break the news to, and Joe. Harriet would approve, she felt; but these others! To assure Anna that she must manage alone for three years, in order to be happy and comfortable afterward—that was hard enough to tell Joe she was planning a future without him, to destroy the light in his blue eyes—that hurt.

After all, Sidney told K. first. One Friday evening, coming home late, as usual, he found her on the doorstep, and Joe gone. She moved over hospitably. The moon had waxed and waned, and the Street was dark. Even the ailanthus blossoms had ceased their snow-like dropping. The colored man who drove Dr. Ed in the old buggy on his daily rounds had brought out the hose and sprinkled the street. Within this zone of freshness, of wet asphalt and dripping gutters, Sidney sat, cool and silent.

“Please sit down. It is cool now. My idea of luxury is to have the Street sprinkled on a hot night.”

K. disposed of his long legs on the steps. He was trying to fit his own ideas of luxury to a garden hose and a city street.

“I’m afraid you’re working too hard.”

“I? I do a minimum of labor for a minimum of wage.

“But you work at night, don’t you?”

K. was natively honest. He hesitated. Then:

“No, Miss Page.”

“But You go out every evening!” Suddenly the truth burst on her.

“Oh, dear!” she said. “I do believe—why, how silly of you!”

K. was most uncomfortable.

“Really, I like it,” he protested. “I hang over a desk all day, and in the evening I want to walk. I ramble around the park and see lovers on benches—it’s rather thrilling. They sit on the same benches evening after evening. I know a lot of them by sight, and if they’re not there I wonder if they have quarreled, or if they have finally got married and ended the romance. You can see how exciting it is.”

Quite suddenly Sidney laughed.

“How very nice you are!” she said—“and how absurd! Why should their getting married end the romance? And don’t you know that, if you insist on walking the streets and parks at night because Joe Drummond is here, I shall have to tell him not to come?”

This did not follow, to K.‘s mind. They had rather a heated argument over it, and became much better acquainted.

“If I were engaged to him,” Sidney ended, her cheeks very pink, “I—I might understand. But, as I am not—”

“Ah!” said K., a trifle unsteadily. “So you are not?”

Only a week—and love was one of the things she had had to give up, with others. Not, of course, that he was in love with Sidney then. But he had been desperately lonely, and, for all her practical clearheadedness, she was softly and appealingly feminine. By way of keeping his head, he talked suddenly and earnestly of Mrs. McKee, and food, and Tillie, and of Mr. Wagner and the pencil pad.

“It’s like a game,” he said. “We disagree on everything, especially Mexico. If you ever tried to spell those Mexican names—”

“Why did you think I was engaged?” she insisted.

Now, in K.‘s walk of life—that walk of life where there are no toothpicks, and no one would have believed that twenty-one meals could have been secured for five dollars with a ticket punch thrown in—young girls did not receive the attention of one young man to the exclusion of others unless they were engaged. But he could hardly say that.

“Oh, I don’t know. Those things get in the air. I am quite certain, for instance, that Reginald suspects it.”

“It’s Johnny Rosenfeld,” said Sidney, with decision. “It’s horrible, the way things get about. Because Joe sent me a box of roses—As a matter of fact, I’m not engaged, or going to be, Mr. Le Moyne. I’m going into a hospital to be a nurse.”

Le Moyne said nothing. For just a moment he closed his eyes. A man is in a rather a bad way when, every time he closes his eyes, he sees the same thing, especially if it is rather terrible. When it gets to a point where he lies awake at night and reads, for fear of closing them—

“You’re too young, aren’t you?”

“Dr. Ed—one of the Wilsons across the Street—is going to help me about that. His brother Max is a big surgeon there. I expect you’ve heard of him. We’re very proud of him in the Street.”

Lucky for K. Le Moyne that the moon no longer shone on the low gray doorstep, that Sidney’s mind had traveled far away to shining floors and rows of white beds. “Life—in the raw,” Dr. Ed had said that other afternoon. Closer to her than the hospital was life in the raw that night.

So, even here, on this quiet street in this distant city, there was to be no peace. Max Wilson just across the way! It—it was ironic. Was there no place where a man could lose himself? He would have to move on again, of course.

But that, it seemed, was just what he could not do. For:

“I want to ask you to do something, and I hope you’ll be quite frank,” said Sidney.

“Anything that I can do—”

“It’s this. If you are comfortable, and—and like the room and all that, I wish you’d stay.” She hurried on: “If I could feel that mother had a dependable person like you in the house, it would all be easier.”

Dependable! That stung.

“But—forgive my asking; I’m really interested—can your mother manage? You’ll get practically no money during your training.”

“I’ve thought of that. A friend of mine, Christine Lorenz, is going to be married. Her people are wealthy, but she’ll have nothing but what Palmer makes. She’d like to have the parlor and the sitting room behind. They wouldn’t interfere with you at all,” she added hastily. “Christine’s father would build a little balcony at the side for them, a sort of porch, and they’d sit there in the evenings.”

Behind Sidney’s carefully practical tone the man read appeal. Never before had he realized how narrow the girl’s world had been. The Street, with but one dimension, bounded it! In her perplexity, she was appealing to him who was practically a stranger.

And he knew then that he must do the thing she asked. He, who had fled so long, could roam no more. Here on the Street, with its menace just across, he must live, that she might work. In his world, men had worked that women might live in certain places, certain ways. This girl was going out to earn her living, and he would stay to make it possible. But no hint of all this was in his voice.

“I shall stay, of course,” he said gravely. “I—this is the nearest thing to home that I’ve known for a long time. I want you to know that.”

So they moved their puppets about, Anna and Harriet, Christine and her husband-to-be, Dr. Ed, even Tillie and the Rosenfelds; shifted and placed them, and, planning, obeyed inevitable law.

“Christine shall come, then,” said Sidney forsooth, “and we will throw out a balcony.”

So they planned, calmly ignorant that poor Christine’s story and Tillie’s and Johnny Rosenfeld’s and all the others’ were already written among the things that are, and the things that shall be hereafter.

“You are very good to me,” said Sidney.

When she rose, K. Le Moyne sprang to his feet.

Anna had noticed that he always rose when she entered his room,—with fresh towels on Katie’s day out, for instance,—and she liked him for it. Years ago, the men she had known had shown this courtesy to their women; but the Street regarded such things as affectation.

“I wonder if you would do me another favor? I’m afraid you’ll take to avoiding me, if I keep on.”

“I don’t think you need fear that.”

“This stupid story about Joe Drummond—I’m not saying I’ll never marry him, but I’m certainly not engaged. Now and then, when you are taking your evening walks, if you would ask me to walk with you—”

K. looked rather dazed.

“I can’t imagine anything pleasanter; but I wish you’d explain just how—”

Sidney smiled at him. As he stood on the lowest step, their eyes were almost level.

“If I walk with you, they’ll know I’m not engaged to Joe,” she said, with engaging directness.

The house was quiet. He waited in the lower hall until she had reached the top of the staircase. For some curious reason, in the time to come, that was the way Sidney always remembered K. Le Moyne—standing in the little hall, one hand upstretched to shut off the gas overhead, and his eyes on hers above.

“Good-night,” said K. Le Moyne. And all the things he had put out of his life were in his voice.

CHAPTER IV

On the morning after Sidney had invited K. Le Moyne to take her to walk, Max Wilson came down to breakfast rather late. Dr. Ed had breakfasted an hour before, and had already attended, with much profanity on the part of the patient, to a boil on the back of Mr. Rosenfeld’s neck.

“Better change your laundry,” cheerfully advised Dr. Ed, cutting a strip of adhesive plaster. “Your neck’s irritated from your white collars.”

Rosenfeld eyed him suspiciously, but, possessing a sense of humor also, he grinned.

“It ain’t my everyday things that bother me,” he replied. “It’s my blankety-blank dress suit. But if a man wants to be tony—”

“Tony” was not of the Street, but of its environs. Harriet was “tony” because she walked with her elbows in and her head up. Dr. Max was “tony” because he breakfasted late, and had a man come once a week and take away his clothes to be pressed. He was “tony,” too, because he had brought back from Europe narrow-shouldered English-cut clothes, when the Street was still padding its shoulders. Even K. would have been classed with these others, for the stick that he carried on his walks, for the fact that his shabby gray coat was as unmistakably foreign in cut as Dr. Max’s, had the neighborhood so much as known him by sight. But K., so far, had remained in humble obscurity, and, outside of Mrs. McKee’s, was known only as the Pages’ roomer.

Mr. Rosenfeld buttoned up the blue flannel shirt which, with a pair of Dr. Ed’s cast-off trousers, was his only wear; and fished in his pocket.

“How much, Doc?”

“Two dollars,” said Dr. Ed briskly.

“Holy cats! For one jab of a knife! My old woman works a day and a half for two dollars.”

“I guess it’s worth two dollars to you to be able to sleep on your back.” He was imperturbably straightening his small glass table. He knew Rosenfeld. “If you don’t like my price, I’ll lend you the knife the next time, and you can let your wife attend to you.”

Rosenfeld drew out a silver dollar, and followed it reluctantly with a limp and dejected dollar bill.

“There are times,” he said, “when, if you’d put me and the missus and a knife in the same room, you wouldn’t have much left but the knife.”

Dr. Ed waited until he had made his stiff-necked exit. Then he took the two dollars, and, putting the money into an envelope, indorsed it in his illegible hand. He heard his brother’s step on the stairs, and Dr. Ed made haste to put away the last vestiges of his little operation.

Ed’s lapses from surgical cleanliness were a sore trial to the younger man, fresh from the clinics of Europe. In his downtown office, to which he would presently make his leisurely progress, he wore a white coat, and sterilized things of which Dr. Ed did not even know the names.

So, as he came down the stairs, Dr. Ed, who had wiped his tiny knife with a bit of cotton,—he hated sterilizing it; it spoiled the edge,—thrust it hastily into his pocket. He had cut boils without boiling anything for a good many years, and no trouble. But he was wise with the wisdom of the serpent and the general practitioner, and there was no use raising a discussion.

Max’s morning mood was always a cheerful one. Now and then the way of the transgressor is disgustingly pleasant. Max, who sat up until all hours of the night, drinking beer or whiskey-and-soda, and playing bridge, wakened to a clean tongue and a tendency to have a cigarette between shoes, so to speak. Ed, whose wildest dissipation had perhaps been to bring into the world one of the neighborhood’s babies, wakened customarily to the dark hour of his day, when he dubbed himself failure and loathed the Street with a deadly loathing.

So now Max brought his handsome self down the staircase and paused at the office door.

“At it, already,” he said. “Or have you been to bed?”

“It’s after nine,” protested Ed mildly. “If I don’t start early, I never get through.”

Max yawned.

“Better come with me,” he said. “If things go on as they’ve been doing, I’ll have to have an assistant. I’d rather have you than anybody, of course.” He put his lithe surgeon’s hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Where would I be if it hadn’t been for you? All the fellows know what you’ve done.”

In spite of himself, Ed winced. It was one thing to work hard that there might be one success instead of two half successes. It was a different thing to advertise one’s mediocrity to the world. His sphere of the Street and the neighborhood was his own. To give it all up and become his younger brother’s assistant—even if it meant, as it would, better hours and more money—would be to submerge his identity. He could not bring himself to it.

“I guess I’ll stay where I am,” he said. “They know me around here, and I know them. By the way, will you leave this envelope at Mrs. McKee’s? Maggie Rosenfeld is ironing there to-day. It’s for her.”

Max took the envelope absently.

“You’ll go on here to the end of your days, working for a pittance,” he objected. “Inside of ten years there’ll be no general practitioners; then where will you be?”

“I’ll manage somehow,” said his brother placidly. “I guess there will always be a few that can pay my prices better than what you specialists ask.”

Max laughed with genuine amusement.

“I dare say, if this is the way you let them pay your prices.”

He held out the envelope, and the older man colored.

Very proud of Dr. Max was his brother, unselfishly proud, of his skill, of his handsome person, of his easy good manners; very humble, too, of his own knowledge and experience. If he ever suspected any lack of finer fiber in Max, he put the thought away. Probably he was too rigid himself. Max was young, a hard worker. He had a right to play hard.

He prepared his black bag for the day’s calls—stethoscope, thermometer, eye-cup, bandages, case of small vials, a lump of absorbent cotton in a not over-fresh towel; in the bottom, a heterogeneous collection of instruments, a roll of adhesive plaster, a bottle or two of sugar-milk tablets for the children, a dog collar that had belonged to a dead collie, and had put in the bag in some curious fashion and there remained.

He prepared the bag a little nervously, while Max ate. He felt that modern methods and the best usage might not have approved of the bag. On his way out he paused at the dining-room door.

“Are you going to the hospital?”

“Operating at four—wish you could come in.”

“I’m afraid not, Max. I’ve promised Sidney Page to speak about her to you. She wants to enter the training-school.”

“Too young,” said Max briefly. “Why, she can’t be over sixteen.”

“She’s eighteen.”

“Well, even eighteen. Do you think any girl of that age is responsible enough to have life and death put in her hands? Besides, although I haven’t noticed her lately, she used to be a pretty little thing. There is no use filling up the wards with a lot of ornaments; it keeps the internes all stewed up.”

“Since when,” asked Dr. Ed mildly, “have you found good looks in a girl a handicap?”

In the end they compromised. Max would see Sidney at his office. It would be better than having her run across the Street—would put things on the right footing. For, if he did have her admitted, she would have to learn at once that he was no longer “Dr. Max”; that, as a matter of fact, he was now staff, and entitled to much dignity, to speech without contradiction or argument, to clean towels, and a deferential interne at his elbow.

Having given his promise, Max promptly forgot about it. The Street did not interest him. Christine and Sidney had been children when he went to Vienna, and since his return he had hardly noticed them. Society, always kind to single men of good appearance and easy good manners, had taken him up. He wore dinner or evening clothes five nights out of seven, and was supposed by his conservative old neighbors to be going the pace. The rumor had been fed by Mrs. Rosenfeld, who, starting out for her day’s washing at six o’clock one morning, had found Dr. Max’s car, lamps lighted, and engine going, drawn up before the house door, with its owner asleep at the wheel. The story traveled the length of the Street that day.

“Him,” said Mrs. Rosenfeld, who was occasionally flowery, “sittin’ up as straight as this washboard, and his silk hat shinin’ in the sun; but exceptin’ the car, which was workin’ hard and gettin’ nowhere, the whole outfit in the arms of Morpheus.”

Mrs. Lorenz, whose day it was to have Mrs. Rosenfeld, and who was unfamiliar with mythology, gasped at the last word.

“Mercy!” she said. “Do you mean to say he’s got that awful drug habit!”

Down the clean steps went Dr. Max that morning, a big man, almost as tall as K. Le Moyne, eager of life, strong and a bit reckless, not fine, perhaps, but not evil. He had the same zest of living as Sidney, but with this difference—the girl stood ready to give herself to life: he knew that life would come to him. All-dominating male was Dr. Max, that morning, as he drew on his gloves before stepping into his car. It was after nine o’clock. K. Le Moyne had been an hour at his desk. The McKee napkins lay ironed in orderly piles.

Nevertheless, Dr. Max was suffering under a sense of defeat as he rode downtown. The night before, he had proposed to a girl and had been rejected. He was not in love with the girl,—she would have been a suitable wife, and a surgeon ought to be married; it gives people confidence,—but his pride was hurt. He recalled the exact words of the rejection.

“You’re too good-looking, Max,” she had said, “and that’s the truth. Now that operations are as popular as fancy dancing, and much less bother, half the women I know are crazy about their surgeons. I’m too fond of my peace of mind.”

“But, good Heavens! haven’t you any confidence in me?” he had demanded.

“None whatever, Max dear.” She had looked at him with level, understanding eyes.

He put the disagreeable recollection out of his mind as he parked his car and made his way to his office. Here would be people who believed in him, from the middle-aged nurse in her prim uniform to the row of patients sitting stiffly around the walls of the waiting-room. Dr. Max, pausing in the hall outside the door of his private office, drew a long breath. This was the real thing—work and plenty of it, a chance to show the other men what he could do, a battle to win! No humanitarian was he, but a fighter: each day he came to his office with the same battle lust.

The office nurse had her back to him. When she turned, he faced an agreeable surprise. Instead of Miss Simpson, he faced a young and attractive girl, faintly familiar.

“We tried to get you by telephone,” she explained. “I am from the hospital. Miss Simpson’s father died this morning, and she knew you would have to have some one. I was just starting for my vacation, so they sent me.”

“Rather a poor substitute for a vacation,” he commented.

She was a very pretty girl. He had seen her before in the hospital, but he had never really noticed how attractive she was. Rather stunning she was, he thought. The combination of yellow hair and dark eyes was unusual. He remembered, just in time, to express regret at Miss Simpson’s bereavement.

“I am Miss Harrison,” explained the substitute, and held out his long white coat. The ceremony, purely perfunctory with Miss Simpson on duty, proved interesting, Miss Harrison, in spite of her high heels, being small and the young surgeon tall. When he was finally in the coat, she was rather flushed and palpitating.

“But I KNEW your name, of course,” lied Dr. Max. “And—I’m sorry about the vacation.”

After that came work. Miss Harrison was nimble and alert, but the surgeon worked quickly and with few words, was impatient when she could not find the things he called for, even broke into restrained profanity now and then. She went a little pale over her mistakes, but preserved her dignity and her wits. Now and then he found her dark eyes fixed on him, with something inscrutable but pleasing in their depths. The situation was: rather piquant. Consciously he was thinking only of what he was doing. Subconsciously his busy ego was finding solace after last night’s rebuff.

Once, during the cleaning up between cases, he dropped to a personality. He was drying his hands, while she placed freshly sterilized instruments on a glass table.

“You are almost a foreign type, Miss Harrison. Last year, in a London ballet, I saw a blonde Spanish girl who looked like you.”

“My mother was a Spaniard.” She did not look up.

Where Miss Simpson was in the habit of clumping through the morning in flat, heavy shoes, Miss Harrison’s small heels beat a busy tattoo on the tiled floor. With the rustling of her starched dress, the sound was essentially feminine, almost insistent. When he had time to notice it, it amused him that he did not find it annoying.

Once, as she passed him a bistoury, he deliberately placed his fine hand over her fingers and smiled into her eyes. It was play for him; it lightened the day’s work.

Sidney was in the waiting-room. There had been no tedium in the morning’s waiting. Like all imaginative people, she had the gift of dramatizing herself. She was seeing herself in white from head to foot, like this efficient young woman who came now and then to the waiting-room door; she was healing the sick and closing tired eyes; she was even imagining herself proposed to by an aged widower with grown children and quantities of money, one of her patients.

She sat very demurely in the waiting-room with a magazine in her lap, and told her aged patient that she admired and respected him, but that she had given herself to the suffering poor.

“Everything in the world that you want,” begged the elderly gentleman. “You should see the world, child, and I will see it again through your eyes. To Paris first for clothes and the opera, and then—”

“But I do not love you,” Sidney replied, mentally but steadily. “In all the world I love only one man. He is—”

She hesitated here. It certainly was not Joe, or K. Le Moyne of the gas office. It seem to her suddenly very sad that there was no one she loved. So many people went into hospitals because they had been disappointed in love.

“Dr. Wilson will see you now.”

She followed Miss Harrison into the consulting room. Dr. Max—not the gloved and hatted Dr. Max of the Street, but a new person, one she had never known—stood in his white office, tall, dark-eyed, dark-haired, competent, holding out his long, immaculate surgeon’s hand, and smiling down at her.

Men, like jewels, require a setting. A clerk on a high stool, poring over a ledger, is not unimpressive, or a cook over her stove. But place the cook on the stool, poring over the ledger! Dr. Max, who had lived all his life on the edge of Sidney’s horizon, now, by the simple changing of her point of view, loomed large and magnificent. Perhaps he knew it. Certainly he stood very erect. Certainly, too, there was considerable manner in the way in which he asked Miss Harrison to go out and close the door behind her.

Sidney’s heart, considering what was happening to it, behaved very well.

“For goodness’ sake, Sidney,” said Dr. Max, “here you are a young lady and I’ve never noticed it!”

This, of course, was not what he had intended to say, being staff and all that. But Sidney, visibly palpitant, was very pretty, much prettier than the Harrison girl, beating a tattoo with her heels in the next room.

Dr. Max, belonging to the class of man who settles his tie every time he sees an attractive woman, thrust his hands into the pockets of his long white coat and surveyed her quizzically.

“Did Dr. Ed tell you?”

“Sit down. He said something about the hospital. How’s your mother and Aunt Harriet?”

“Very well—that is, mother’s never quite well.” She was sitting forward on her chair, her wide young eyes on him. “Is that—is your nurse from the hospital here?”

“Yes. But she’s not my nurse. She’s a substitute.”

“The uniform is so pretty.” Poor Sidney! with all the things she had meant to say about a life of service, and that, although she was young, she was terribly in earnest.

“It takes a lot of plugging before one gets the uniform. Look here, Sidney; if you are going to the hospital because of the uniform, and with any idea of soothing fevered brows and all that nonsense—”

She interrupted him, deeply flushed. Indeed, no. She wanted to work. She was young and strong, and surely a pair of willing hands—that was absurd about the uniform. She had no silly ideas. There was so much to do in the world, and she wanted to help. Some people could give money, but she couldn’t. She could only offer service. And, partly through earnestness and partly through excitement, she ended in a sort of nervous sob, and, going to the window, stood with her back to him.

He followed her, and, because they were old neighbors, she did not resent it when he put his hand on her shoulder.

“I don’t know—of course, if you feel like that about it,” he said, “we’ll see what can be done. It’s hard work, and a good many times it seems futile. They die, you know, in spite of all we can do. And there are many things that are worse than death—”

His voice trailed off. When he had started out in his profession, he had had some such ideal of service as this girl beside him. For just a moment, as he stood there close to her, he saw things again with the eyes of his young faith: to relieve pain, to straighten the crooked, to hurt that he might heal,—not to show the other men what he could do,—that had been his early creed. He sighed a little as he turned away.

“I’ll speak to the superintendent about you,” he said. “Perhaps you’d like me to show you around a little.”

“When? To-day?”

He had meant in a month, or a year. It was quite a minute before he replied:—

“Yes, to-day, if you say. I’m operating at four. How about three o’clock?”

She held out both hands, and he took them, smiling.

“You are the kindest person I ever met.”

“And—perhaps you’d better not say you are applying until we find out if there is a vacancy.”

“May I tell one person?”

“Mother?”

“No. We—we have a roomer now. He is very much interested. I should like to tell him.”

He dropped her hands and looked at her in mock severity.

“Much interested! Is he in love with you?”

“Mercy, no!”

“I don’t believe it. I’m jealous. You know, I’ve always been more than half in love with you myself!”

Play for him—the same victorious instinct that had made him touch Miss Harrison’s fingers as she gave him the instrument. And Sidney knew how it was meant; she smiled into his eyes and drew down her veil briskly.

“Then we’ll say at three,” she said calmly, and took an orderly and unflurried departure.

But the little seed of tenderness had taken root. Sidney, passing in the last week or two from girlhood to womanhood,—outgrowing Joe, had she only known it, as she had outgrown the Street,—had come that day into her first contact with a man of the world. True, there was K. Le Moyne. But K. was now of the Street, of that small world of one dimension that she was leaving behind her.

She sent him a note at noon, with word to Tillie at Mrs. McKee’s to put it under his plate:—

DEAR MR. LE MOYNE,—I am so excited I can hardly write. Dr. Wilson, the surgeon, is going to take me through the hospital this afternoon. Wish me luck. SIDNEY PAGE.

K. read it, and, perhaps because the day was hot and his butter soft and the other “mealers” irritable with the heat, he ate little or no luncheon. Before he went out into the sun, he read the note again. To his jealous eyes came a vision of that excursion to the hospital. Sidney, all vibrant eagerness, luminous of eye, quick of bosom; and Wilson, sardonically smiling, amused and interested in spite of himself. He drew a long breath, and thrust the note in his pocket.

The little house across the way sat square in the sun. The shades of his windows had been lowered against the heat. K. Le Moyne made an impulsive movement toward it and checked himself.

As he went down the Street, Wilson’s car came around the corner. Le Moyne moved quietly into the shadow of the church and watched the car go by.

CHAPTER V

Sidney and K. Le Moyne sat under a tree and talked. In Sidney’s lap lay a small pasteboard box, punched with many holes. It was the day of releasing Reginald, but she had not yet been able to bring herself to the point of separation. Now and then a furry nose protruded from one of the apertures and sniffed the welcome scent of pine and buttonball, red and white clover, the thousand spicy odors of field and woodland.

“And so,” said K. Le Moyne, “you liked it all? It didn’t startle you?”

“Well, in one way, of course—you see, I didn’t know it was quite like that: all order and peace and quiet, and white beds and whispers, on top,—you know what I mean,—and the misery there just the same. Have you ever gone through a hospital?”

K. Le Moyne was stretched out on the grass, his arms under his head. For this excursion to the end of the street-car line he had donned a pair of white flannel trousers and a belted Norfolk coat. Sidney had been divided between pride in his appearance and fear that the Street would deem him overdressed.

At her question he closed his eyes, shutting out the peaceful arch and the bit of blue heaven overhead. He did not reply at once.

“Good gracious, I believe he’s asleep!” said Sidney to the pasteboard box.

But he opened his eyes and smiled at her.

“I’ve been around hospitals a little. I suppose now there is no question about your going?”

“The superintendent said I was young, but that any protegee of Dr. Wilson’s would certainly be given a chance.”

“It is hard work, night and day.”

“Do you think I am afraid of work?”

“And—Joe?”

Sidney colored vigorously and sat erect.

“He is very silly. He’s taken all sorts of idiotic notions in his head.”

“Such as—”

“Well, he HATES the hospital, of course. As if, even if I meant to marry him, it wouldn’t be years before he can be ready.”

“Do you think you are quite fair to Joe?”

“I haven’t promised to marry him.”

“But he thinks you mean to. If you have quite made up your mind not to, better tell him, don’t you think? What—what are these idiotic notions?”

Sidney considered, poking a slim finger into the little holes in the box.

“You can see how stupid he is, and—and young. For one thing, he’s jealous of you!”

“I see. Of course that is silly, although your attitude toward his suspicion is hardly flattering to me.”

He smiled up at her.

“I told him that I had asked you to bring me here to-day. He was furious. And that wasn’t all.”

“No?”

“He said I was flirting desperately with Dr. Wilson. You see, the day we went through the hospital, it was hot, and we went to Henderson’s for soda-water. And, of course, Joe was there. It was really dramatic.”

K. Le Moyne was daily gaining the ability to see things from the angle of the Street. A month ago he could have seen no situation in two people, a man and a girl, drinking soda-water together, even with a boy lover on the next stool. Now he could view things through Joe’s tragic eyes. And there as more than that. All day he had noticed how inevitably the conversation turned to the young surgeon. Did they start with Reginald, with the condition of the morning-glory vines, with the proposition of taking up the quaint paving-stones and macadamizing the Street, they ended with the younger Wilson.

Sidney’s active young brain, turned inward for the first time in her life, was still on herself.

“Mother is plaintively resigned—and Aunt Harriet has been a trump. She’s going to keep her room. It’s really up to you.”

“To me?”

“To your staying on. Mother trusts you absolutely. I hope you noticed that you got one of the apostle spoons with the custard she sent up to you the other night. And she didn’t object to this trip to-day. Of course, as she said herself, it isn’t as if you were young, or at all wild.”

In spite of himself, K. was rather startled. He felt old enough, God knew, but he had always thought of it as an age of the spirit. How old did this child think he was?

“I have promised to stay on, in the capacity of watch-dog, burglar-alarm, and occasional recipient of an apostle spoon in a dish of custard. Lightning-conductor, too—your mother says she isn’t afraid of storms if there is a man in the house. I’ll stay, of course.”

The thought of his age weighed on him. He rose to his feet and threw back his fine shoulders.

“Aunt Harriet and your mother and Christine and her husband-to-be, whatever his name is—we’ll be a happy family. But, I warn you, if I ever hear of Christine’s husband getting an apostle spoon—”

She smiled up at him. “You are looking very grand to-day. But you have grass stains on your white trousers. Perhaps Katie can take them out.”

Quite suddenly K. felt that she thought him too old for such frivolity of dress. It put him on his mettle.

“How old do you think I am, Miss Sidney?”

She considered, giving him, after her kindly way, the benefit of the doubt.

“Not over forty, I’m sure.”

“I’m almost thirty. It is middle age, of course, but it is not senility.”

She was genuinely surprised, almost disturbed.

“Perhaps we’d better not tell mother,” she said. “You don’t mind being thought older?”

“Not at all.”

Clearly the subject of his years did not interest her vitally, for she harked back to the grass stains.

“I’m afraid you’re not saving, as you promised. Those are new clothes, aren’t they?”

“No, indeed. Bought years ago in England—the coat in London, the trousers in Bath, on a motor tour. Cost something like twelve shillings. Awfully cheap. They wear them for cricket.”

That was a wrong move, of course. Sidney must hear about England; and she marveled politely, in view of his poverty, about his being there. Poor Le Moyne floundered in a sea of mendacity, rose to a truth here and there, clutched at luncheon, and achieved safety at last.

“To think,” said Sidney, “that you have really been across the ocean! I never knew but one person who had been abroad. It is Dr. Max Wilson.”

Back again to Dr. Max! Le Moyne, unpacking sandwiches from a basket, was aroused by a sheer resentment to an indiscretion.

“You like this Wilson chap pretty well, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You talk about him rather a lot.”

This was sheer recklessness, of course. He expected fury, annihilation. He did not look up, but busied himself with the luncheon. When the silence grew oppressive, he ventured to glance toward her. She was leaning forward, her chin cupped in her palms, staring out over the valley that stretched at their feet.

“Don’t speak to me for a minute or two,” she said. “I’m thinking over what you have just said.”

Manlike, having raised the issue, K. would have given much to evade it. Not that he had owned himself in love with Sidney. Love was not for him. But into his loneliness and despair the girl had came like a ray of light. She typified that youth and hope that he had felt slipping away from him. Through her clear eyes he was beginning to see a new world. Lose her he must, and that he knew; but not this way.

Down through the valley ran a shallow river, making noisy pretensions to both depth and fury. He remembered just such a river in the Tyrol, with this same Wilson on a rock, holding the hand of a pretty Austrian girl, while he snapped the shutter of a camera. He had that picture somewhere now; but the girl was dead, and, of the three, Wilson was the only one who had met life and vanquished it.

“I’ve known him all my life,” Sidney said at last. “You’re perfectly right about one thing: I talk about him and I think about him. I’m being candid, because what’s the use of being friends if we’re not frank? I admire him—you’d have to see him in the hospital, with every one deferring to him and all that, to understand. And when you think of a manlike that, who holds life and death in his hands, of course you rather thrill. I—I honestly believe that’s all there is to it.”

“If that’s the whole thing, that’s hardly a mad passion.” He tried to smile; succeeded faintly.

“Well, of course, there’s this, too. I know he’ll never look at me. I’ll be one of forty nurses; indeed, for three months I’ll be only a probationer. He’ll probably never even remember I’m in the hospital at all.”

“I see. Then, if you thought he was in love with you, things would be different?”

“If I thought Dr. Max Wilson was in love with me,” said Sidney solemnly, “I’d go out of my head with joy.”

One of the new qualities that K. Le Moyne was cultivating was of living each day for itself. Having no past and no future, each day was worth exactly what it brought. He was to look back to this day with mingled feelings: sheer gladness at being out in the open with Sidney; the memory of the shock with which he realized that she was, unknown to herself, already in the throes of a romantic attachment for Wilson; and, long, long after, when he had gone down to the depths with her and saved her by his steady hand, with something of mirth for the untoward happening that closed the day.

Sidney fell into the river.

They had released Reginald, released him with the tribute of a shamefaced tear on Sidney’s part, and a handful of chestnuts from K. The little squirrel had squeaked his gladness, and, tail erect, had darted into the grass.

“Ungrateful little beast!” said Sidney, and dried her eyes. “Do you suppose he’ll ever think of the nuts again, or find them?”

“He’ll be all right,” K. replied. “The little beggar can take care of himself, if only—”

“If only what?”

“If only he isn’t too friendly. He’s apt to crawl into the pockets of any one who happens around.”

She was alarmed at that. To make up for his indiscretion, K. suggested a descent to the river. She accepted eagerly, and he helped her down. That was another memory that outlasted the day—her small warm hand in his; the time she slipped and he caught her; the pain in her eyes at one of his thoughtless remarks.

“I’m going to be pretty lonely,” he said, when she had paused in the descent and was taking a stone out of her low shoe. “Reginald gone, and you going! I shall hate to come home at night.” And then, seeing her wince: “I’ve been whining all day. For Heaven’s sake, don’t look like that. If there’s one sort of man I detest more than another, it’s a man who is sorry for himself. Do you suppose your mother would object if we stayed, out here at the hotel for supper? I’ve ordered a moon, orange-yellow and extra size.”

“I should hate to have anything ordered and wasted.”

“Then we’ll stay.”

“It’s fearfully extravagant.”

“I’ll be thrifty as to moons while you are in the hospital.”

So it was settled. And, as it happened, Sidney had to stay, anyhow. For, having perched herself out in the river on a sugar-loaf rock, she slid, slowly but with a dreadful inevitability, into the water. K. happened to be looking in another direction. So it occurred that at one moment, Sidney sat on a rock, fluffy white from head to feet, entrancingly pretty, and knowing it, and the next she was standing neck deep in water, much too startled to scream, and trying to be dignified under the rather trying circumstances. K. had not looked around. The splash had been a gentle one.

“If you will be good enough,” said Sidney, with her chin well up, “to give me your hand or a pole or something—because if the river rises an inch I shall drown.”

To his undying credit, K. Le Moyne did not laugh when he turned and saw her. He went out on the sugar-loaf rock, and lifted her bodily up its slippery sides. He had prodigious strength, in spite of his leanness.

“Well!” said Sidney, when they were both on the rock, carefully balanced.

“Are you cold?”

“Not a bit. But horribly unhappy. I must look a sight.” Then, remembering her manners, as the Street had it, she said primly:—

“Thank you for saving me.”

“There wasn’t any danger, really, unless—unless the river had risen.”

And then, suddenly, he burst into delighted laughter, the first, perhaps, for months. He shook with it, struggled at the sight of her injured face to restrain it, achieved finally a degree of sobriety by fixing his eyes on the river-bank.

“When you have quite finished,” said Sidney severely, “perhaps you will take me to the hotel. I dare say I shall have to be washed and ironed.”

He drew her cautiously to her feet. Her wet skirts clung to her; her shoes were sodden and heavy. She clung to him frantically, her eyes on the river below. With the touch of her hands the man’s mirth died. He held her very carefully, very tenderly, as one holds something infinitely precious.

CHAPTER VI

The same day Dr. Max operated at the hospital. It was a Wilson day, the young surgeon having six cases. One of the innovations Dr. Max had made was to change the hour for major operations from early morning to mid-afternoon. He could do as well later in the day,—his nerves were steady, and uncounted numbers of cigarettes did not make his hand shake,—and he hated to get up early.

The staff had fallen into the way of attending Wilson’s operations. His technique was good; but technique alone never gets a surgeon anywhere. Wilson was getting results. Even the most jealous of that most jealous of professions, surgery, had to admit that he got results.

Operations were over for the afternoon. The last case had been wheeled out of the elevator. The pit of the operating-room was in disorder—towels everywhere, tables of instruments, steaming sterilizers. Orderlies were going about, carrying out linens, emptying pans. At a table two nurses were cleaning instruments and putting them away in their glass cases. Irrigators were being emptied, sponges recounted and checked off on written lists.

In the midst of the confusion, Wilson stood giving last orders to the interne at his elbow. As he talked he scoured his hands and arms with a small brush; bits of lather flew off on to the tiled floor. His speech was incisive, vigorous. At the hospital they said his nerves were iron; there was no let-down after the day’s work. The internes worshiped and feared him. He was just, but without mercy. To be able to work like that, so certainly, with so sure a touch, and to look like a Greek god! Wilson’s only rival, a gynecologist named O’Hara, got results, too; but he sweated and swore through his operations, was not too careful as to asepsis, and looked like a gorilla.

The day had been a hard one. The operating room nurses were fagged. Two or three probationers had been sent to help cleanup, and a senior nurse. Wilson’s eyes caught the nurse’s eyes as she passed him.

“Here, too, Miss Harrison!” he said gayly. “Have they set you on my trail?”

With the eyes of the room on her, the girl answered primly:—

“I’m to be in your office in the mornings, Dr. Wilson, and anywhere I am needed in the afternoons.”

“And your vacation?”

“I shall take it when Miss Simpson comes back.”

Although he went on at once with his conversation with the interne, he still heard the click of her heels about the room. He had not lost the fact that she had flushed when he spoke to her. The mischief that was latent in him came to the surface. When he had rinsed his hands, he followed her, carrying the towel to where she stood talking to the superintendent of the training school.

“Thanks very much, Miss Gregg,” he said. “Everything went off nicely.”

“I was sorry about that catgut. We have no trouble with what we prepare ourselves. But with so many operations—”

He was in a magnanimous mood. He smiled’ at Miss Gregg, who was elderly and gray, but visibly his creature.

“That’s all right. It’s the first time, and of course it will be the last.”

“The sponge list, doctor.”

He glanced over it, noting accurately sponges prepared, used, turned in. But he missed no gesture of the girl who stood beside Miss Gregg.

“All right.” He returned the list. “That was a mighty pretty probationer I brought you yesterday.”

Two small frowning lines appeared between Miss Harrison’s dark brows. He caught them, caught her somber eyes too, and was amused and rather stimulated.

“She is very young.”

“Prefer ‘em young,” said Dr. Max. “Willing to learn at that age. You’ll have to watch her, though. You’ll have all the internes buzzing around, neglecting business.”

Miss Gregg rather fluttered. She was divided between her disapproval of internes at all times and of young probationers generally, and her allegiance to the brilliant surgeon whose word was rapidly becoming law in the hospital. When an emergency of the cleaning up called her away, doubt still in her eyes, Wilson was left alone with Miss Harrison.

“Tired?” He adopted the gentle, almost tender tone that made most women his slaves.

“A little. It is warm.”

“What are you going to do this evening? Any lectures?”

“Lectures are over for the summer. I shall go to prayers, and after that to the roof for air.”

There was a note of bitterness in her voice. Under the eyes of the other nurses, she was carefully contained. They might have been outlining the morning’s work at his office.

“The hand lotion, please.”

She brought it obediently and poured it into his cupped hands. The solutions of the operating-room played havoc with the skin: the surgeons, and especially Wilson, soaked their hands plentifully with a healing lotion.

Over the bottle their eyes met again, and this time the girl smiled faintly.

“Can’t you take a little ride tonight and cool off? I’ll have the car wherever you say. A ride and some supper—how does it sound? You could get away at seven—”

“Miss Gregg is coming!”

With an impassive face, the girl took the bottle away. The workers of the operating-room surged between them. An interne presented an order-book; moppers had come in and waited to clean the tiled floor. There seemed no chance for Wilson to speak to Miss Harrison again.

But he was clever with the guile of the pursuing male. Eyes of all on him, he turned at the door of the wardrobe-room, where he would exchange his white garments for street clothing, and spoke to her over the heads of a dozen nurses.

“That patient’s address that I had forgotten, Miss Harrison, is the corner of the Park and Ellington Avenue.”

“Thank you.”

She played the game well, was quite calm. He admired her coolness. Certainly she was pretty, and certainly, too, she was interested in him. The hurt to his pride of a few nights before was healed. He went whistling into the wardrobe-room. As he turned he caught the interne’s eye, and there passed between them a glance of complete comprehension. The interne grinned.

The room was not empty. His brother was there, listening to the comments of O’Hara, his friendly rival.

“Good work, boy!” said O’Hara, and clapped a hairy hand on his shoulder. “That last case was a wonder. I’m proud of you, and your brother here is indecently exalted. It was the Edwardes method, wasn’t it? I saw it done at his clinic in New York.”

“Glad you liked it. Yes. Edwardes was a pal at mine in Berlin. A great surgeon, too, poor old chap!”

“There aren’t three men in the country with the nerve and the hand for it.”

O’Hara went out, glowing with his own magnanimity. Deep in his heart was a gnawing of envy—not for himself, but for his work. These young fellows with no family ties, who could run over to Europe and bring back anything new that was worth while, they had it all over the older men. Not that he would have changed things. God forbid!

Dr. Ed stood by and waited while his brother got into his street clothes. He was rather silent. There were many times when he wished that their mother could have lived to see how he had carried out his promise to “make a man of Max.” This was one of them. Not that he took any credit for Max’s brilliant career—but he would have liked her to know that things were going well. He had a picture of her over his office desk. Sometimes he wondered what she would think of his own untidy methods compared with Max’s extravagant order—of the bag, for instance, with the dog’s collar in it, and other things. On these occasions he always determined to clear out the bag.

“I guess I’ll be getting along,” he said. “Will you be home to dinner?”

“I think not. I’ll—I’m going to run out of town, and eat where it’s cool.”

The Street was notoriously hot in summer. When Dr. Max was newly home from Europe, and Dr. Ed was selling a painfully acquired bond or two to furnish the new offices downtown, the brothers had occasionally gone together, by way of the trolley, to the White Springs Hotel for supper. Those had been gala days for the older man. To hear names that he had read with awe, and mispronounced, most of his life, roll off Max’s tongue—“Old Steinmetz” and “that ass of a Heydenreich”; to hear the medical and surgical gossip of the Continent, new drugs, new technique, the small heart-burnings of the clinics, student scandal—had brought into his drab days a touch of color. But that was over now. Max had new friends, new social obligations; his time was taken up. And pride would not allow the older brother to show how he missed the early days.

Forty-two he was, and; what with sleepless nights and twenty years of hurried food, he looked fifty. Fifty, then, to Max’s thirty.

“There’s a roast of beef. It’s a pity to cook a roast for one.”

Wasteful, too, this cooking of food for two and only one to eat it. A roast of beef meant a visit, in Dr. Ed’s modest-paying clientele. He still paid the expenses of the house on the Street.

“Sorry, old man; I’ve made another arrangement.”

They left the hospital together. Everywhere the younger man received the homage of success. The elevator-man bowed and flung the doors open, with a smile; the pharmacy clerk, the doorkeeper, even the convalescent patient who was polishing the great brass doorplate, tendered their tribute. Dr. Ed looked neither to right nor left.

At the machine they separated. But Dr. Ed stood for a moment with his hand on the car.

“I was thinking, up there this afternoon,” he said slowly, “that I’m not sure I want Sidney Page to become a nurse.”

“Why?”

“There’s a good deal in life that a girl need not know—not, at least, until her husband tells her. Sidney’s been guarded, and it’s bound to be a shock.”

“It’s her own choice.”

“Exactly. A child reaches out for the fire.”

The motor had started. For the moment, at least, the younger Wilson had no interest in Sidney Page.

“She’ll manage all right. Plenty of other girls have taken the training and come through without spoiling their zest for life.”

Already, as the car moved off, his mind was on his appointment for the evening.

Sidney, after her involuntary bath in the river, had gone into temporary eclipse at the White Springs Hotel. In the oven of the kitchen stove sat her two small white shoes, stuffed with paper so that they might dry in shape. Back in a detached laundry, a sympathetic maid was ironing various soft white garments, and singing as she worked.

Sidney sat in a rocking-chair in a hot bedroom. She was carefully swathed in a sheet from neck to toes, except for her arms, and she was being as philosophic as possible. After all, it was a good chance to think things over. She had very little time to think, generally.

She meant to give up Joe Drummond. She didn’t want to hurt him. Well, there was that to think over and a matter of probation dresses to be talked over later with her Aunt Harriet. Also, there was a great deal of advice to K. Le Moyne, who was ridiculously extravagant, before trusting the house to him. She folded her white arms and prepared to think over all these things. As a matter of fact, she went mentally, like an arrow to its mark, to the younger Wilson—to his straight figure in its white coat, to his dark eyes and heavy hair, to the cleft in his chin when he smiled.

“You know, I have always been more than half in love with you myself…”

Some one tapped lightly at the door. She was back again in the stuffy hotel room, clutching the sheet about her.

“Yes?”

“It’s Le Moyne. Are you all right?”

“Perfectly. How stupid it must be for you!”

“I’m doing very well. The maid will soon be ready. What shall I order for supper?”

“Anything. I’m starving.”

Whatever visions K. Le Moyne may have had of a chill or of a feverish cold were dispelled by that.

“The moon has arrived, as per specifications. Shall we eat on the terrace?”

“I have never eaten on a terrace in my life. I’d love it.”

“I think your shoes have shrunk.”

“Flatterer!” She laughed. “Go away and order supper. And I can see fresh lettuce. Shall we have a salad?”

K. Le Moyne assured her through the door that he would order a salad, and prepared to descend.

But he stood for a moment in front of the closed door, for the mere sound of her moving, beyond it. Things had gone very far with the Pages’ roomer that day in the country; not so far as they were to go, but far enough to let him see on the brink of what misery he stood.

He could not go away. He had promised her to stay: he was needed. He thought he could have endured seeing her marry Joe, had she cared for the boy. That way, at least, lay safety for her. The boy had fidelity and devotion written large over him. But this new complication—her romantic interest in Wilson, the surgeon’s reciprocal interest in her, with what he knew of the man—made him quail.

From the top of the narrow staircase to the foot, and he had lived a year’s torment! At the foot, however, he was startled out of his reverie. Joe Drummond stood there waiting for him, his blue eyes recklessly alight.

“You—you dog!” said Joe.

There were people in the hotel parlor. Le Moyne took the frenzied boy by the elbow and led him past the door to the empty porch.

“Now,” he said, “if you will keep your voice down, I’ll listen to what you have to say.”

“You know what I’ve got to say.”

This failing to draw from K. Le Moyne anything but his steady glance, Joe jerked his arm free, and clenched his fist.

“What did you bring her out here for?”

“I do not know that I owe you any explanation, but I am willing to give you one. I brought her out here for a trolley ride and a picnic luncheon. Incidentally we brought the ground squirrel out and set him free.”

He was sorry for the boy. Life not having been all beer and skittles to him, he knew that Joe was suffering, and was marvelously patient with him.

“Where is she now?”

“She had the misfortune to fall in the river. She is upstairs.” And, seeing the light of unbelief in Joe’s eyes: “If you care to make a tour of investigation, you will find that I am entirely truthful. In the laundry a maid—”

“She is engaged to me”—doggedly. “Everybody in the neighborhood knows it; and yet you bring her out here for a picnic! It’s—it’s damned rotten treatment.”

His fist had unclenched. Before K. Le Moyne’s eyes his own fell. He felt suddenly young and futile; his just rage turned to blustering in his ears.

“Now, be honest with yourself. Is there really an engagement?”

“Yes,” doggedly.

“Even in that case, isn’t it rather arrogant to say that—that the young lady in question can accept no ordinary friendly attentions from another man?”

Utter astonishment left Joe almost speechless. The Street, of course, regarded an engagement as a setting aside of the affianced couple, an isolation of two, than which marriage itself was not more a solitude a deux. After a moment:—

“I don’t know where you came from,” he said, “but around here decent men cut out when a girl’s engaged.”

“I see!”

“What’s more, what do we know about you? Who are you, anyhow? I’ve looked you up. Even at your office they don’t know anything. You may be all right, but how do I know it? And, even if you are, renting a room in the Page house doesn’t entitle you to interfere with the family. You get her into trouble and I’ll kill you!”

It took courage, that speech, with K. Le Moyne towering five inches above him and growing a little white about the lips.

“Are you going to say all these things to Sidney?”

“Does she allow you to call her Sidney?”

“Are you?”

“I am. And I am going to find out why you were upstairs just now.”

Perhaps never in his twenty-two years had young Drummond been so near a thrashing. Fury that he was ashamed of shook Le Moyne. For very fear of himself, he thrust his hands in the pockets of his Norfolk coat.

“Very well,” he said. “You go to her with just one of these ugly insinuations, and I’ll take mighty good care that you are sorry for it. I don’t care to threaten. You’re younger than I am, and lighter. But if you are going to behave like a bad child, you deserve a licking, and I’ll give it to you.”

An overflow from the parlor poured out on the porch. Le Moyne had got himself in hand somewhat. He was still angry, but the look in Joe’s eyes startled him. He put a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“You’re wrong, old man,” he said. “You’re insulting the girl you care for by the things you are thinking. And, if it’s any comfort to you, I have no intention of interfering in any way. You can count me out. It’s between you and her.” Joe picked his straw hat from a chair and stood turning it in his hands.

“Even if you don’t care for her, how do I know she isn’t crazy about you?”

“My word of honor, she isn’t.”

“She sends you notes to McKees’.”

“Just to clear the air, I’ll show it to you. It’s no breach of confidence. It’s about the hospital.”

Into the breast pocket of his coat he dived and brought up a wallet. The wallet had had a name on it in gilt letters that had been carefully scraped off. But Joe did not wait to see the note.

“Oh, damn the hospital!” he said—and went swiftly down the steps and into the gathering twilight of the June night.

It was only when he reached the street-car, and sat huddled in a corner, that he remembered something.

Only about the hospital—but Le Moyne had kept the note, treasured it! Joe was not subtle, not even clever; but he was a lover, and he knew the ways of love. The Pages’ roomer was in love with Sidney whether he knew it or not.

CHAPTER VII

Carlotta Harrison pleaded a headache, and was excused from the operating-room and from prayers.

“I’m sorry about the vacation,” Miss Gregg said kindly, “but in a day or two I can let you off. Go out now and get a little air.”

The girl managed to dissemble the triumph in her eyes.

“Thank you,” she said languidly, and turned away. Then: “About the vacation, I am not in a hurry. If Miss Simpson needs a few days to straighten things out, I can stay on with Dr. Wilson.”

Young women on the eve of a vacation were not usually so reasonable. Miss Gregg was grateful.

“She will probably need a week. Thank you. I wish more of the girls were as thoughtful, with the house full and operations all day and every day.”

Outside the door of the anaesthetizing-room Miss Harrison’s languor vanished. She sped along corridors and up the stairs, not waiting for the deliberate elevator. Inside of her room, she closed and bolted the door, and, standing before her mirror, gazed long at her dark eyes and bright hair. Then she proceeded briskly with her dressing.

Carlotta Harrison was not a child. Though she was only three years older than Sidney, her experience of life was as of three to Sidney’s one. The product of a curious marriage,—when Tommy Harrison of Harrison’s Minstrels, touring Spain with his troupe, had met the pretty daughter of a Spanish shopkeeper and eloped with her,—she had certain qualities of both, a Yankee shrewdness and capacity that made her a capable nurse, complicated by occasional outcroppings of southern Europe, furious bursts of temper, slow and smouldering vindictiveness. A passionate creature, in reality, smothered under hereditary Massachusetts caution.

She was well aware of the risks of the evening’s adventure. The only dread she had was of the discovery of her escapade by the hospital authorities. Lines were sharply drawn. Nurses were forbidden more than the exchange of professional conversation with the staff. In that world of her choosing, of hard work and little play, of service and self-denial and vigorous rules of conduct, discovery meant dismissal.

She put on a soft black dress, open at the throat, and with a wide white collar and cuffs of some sheer material. Her yellow hair was drawn high under her low black hat. From her Spanish mother she had learned to please the man, not herself. She guessed that Dr. Max would wish her to be inconspicuous, and she dressed accordingly. Then, being a cautious person, she disarranged her bed slightly and thumped a hollow into her pillow. The nurses’ rooms were subject to inspection, and she had pleaded a headache.

She was exactly on time. Dr. Max, driving up to the corner five minutes late, found her there, quite matter-of-fact but exceedingly handsome, and acknowledged the evening’s adventure much to his taste.

“A little air first, and then supper—how’s that?”

“Air first, please. I’m very tired.”

He turned the car toward the suburbs, and then, bending toward her, smiled into her eyes.

“Well, this is life!”

“I’m cool for the first time to-day.”

After that they spoke very little. Even Wilson’s superb nerves had felt the strain of the afternoon, and under the girl’s dark eyes were purplish shadows. She leaned back, weary but luxuriously content.

“Not uneasy, are you?”

“Not particularly. I’m too comfortable. But I hope we’re not seen.”

“Even if we are, why not? You are going with me to a case. I’ve driven Miss Simpson about a lot.”

It was almost eight when he turned the car into the drive of the White Springs Hotel. The six-to-eight supper was almost over. One or two motor parties were preparing for the moonlight drive back to the city. All around was virgin country, sweet with early summer odors of new-cut grass, of blossoming trees and warm earth. On the grass terrace over the valley, where ran Sidney’s unlucky river, was a magnolia full of creamy blossoms among waxed leaves. Its silhouette against the sky was quaintly heart-shaped.

Under her mask of languor, Carlotta’s heart was beating wildly. What an adventure! What a night! Let him lose his head a little; she could keep hers. If she were skillful and played things right, who could tell? To marry him, to leave behind the drudgery of the hospital, to feel safe as she had not felt for years, that was a stroke to play for!

The magnolia was just beside her. She reached up and, breaking off one of the heavy-scented flowers, placed it in the bosom of her black dress.

Sidney and K. Le Moyne were dining together. The novelty of the experience had made her eyes shine like stars. She saw only the magnolia tree shaped like a heart, the terrace edged with low shrubbery, and beyond the faint gleam that was the river. For her the dish-washing clatter of the kitchen was stilled, the noises from the bar were lost in the ripple of the river; the scent of the grass killed the odor of stale beer that wafted out through the open windows. The unshaded glare of the lights behind her in the house was eclipsed by the crescent edge of the rising moon. Dinner was over. Sidney was experiencing the rare treat of after-dinner coffee.

Le Moyne, grave and contained, sat across from her. To give so much pleasure, and so easily! How young she was, and radiant! No wonder the boy was mad about her. She fairly held out her arms to life.

Ah, that was too bad! Another table was being brought; they were not to be alone. But, what roused him in violent resentment only appealed to Sidney’s curiosity. “Two places!” she commented. “Lovers, of course. Or perhaps honeymooners.”

K. tried to fall into her mood.

“A box of candy against a good cigar, they are a stolid married couple.”

“How shall we know?”

“That’s easy. If they loll back and watch the kitchen door, I win. If they lean forward, elbows on the table, and talk, you get the candy.”

Sidney, who had been leaning forward, talking eagerly over the table, suddenly straightened and flushed.

Carlotta Harrison came out alone. Although the tapping of her heels was dulled by the grass, although she had exchanged her cap for the black hat, Sidney knew her at once. A sort of thrill ran over her. It was the pretty nurse from Dr. Wilson’s office. Was it possible—but of course not! The book of rules stated explicitly that such things were forbidden.

“Don’t turn around,” she said swiftly. “It is the Miss Harrison I told you about. She is looking at us.”

Carlotta’s eyes were blinded for a moment by the glare of the house lights. She dropped into her chair, with a flash of resentment at the proximity of the other table. She languidly surveyed its two occupants. Then she sat up, her eyes on Le Moyne’s grave profile turned toward the valley.

Lucky for her that Wilson had stopped in the bar, that Sidney’s instinctive good manners forbade her staring, that only the edge of the summer moon shone through the trees. She went white and clutched the edge of the table, with her eyes closed. That gave her quick brain a chance. It was madness, June madness. She was always seeing him even in her dreams. This man was older, much older. She looked again.

She had not been mistaken. Here, and after all these months! K. Le Moyne, quite unconscious of her presence, looked down into the valley.

Wilson appeared on the wooden porch above the terrace, and stood, his eyes searching the half light for her. If he came down to her, the man at the next table might turn, would see her—

She rose and went swiftly back toward the hotel. All the gayety was gone out of the evening for her, but she forced a lightness she did not feel:—

“It is so dark and depressing out there—it makes me sad.”

“Surely you do not want to dine in the house?”

“Do you mind?”

“Just as you wish. This is your evening.”

But he was not pleased. The prospect of the glaring lights and soiled linen of the dining-room jarred on his aesthetic sense. He wanted a setting for himself, for the girl. Environment was vital to him. But when, in the full light of the moon, he saw the purplish shadows under her eyes, he forgot his resentment. She had had a hard day. She was tired. His easy sympathies were roused. He leaned over and ran his and caressingly along her bare forearm.

“Your wish is my law—tonight,” he said softly.

After all, the evening was a disappointment to him. The spontaneity had gone out of it, for some reason. The girl who had thrilled to his glance those two mornings in his office, whose somber eyes had met his fire for fire, across the operating-room, was not playing up. She sat back in her chair, eating little, starting at every step. Her eyes, which by every rule of the game should have been gazing into his, were fixed on the oilcloth-covered passage outside the door.

“I think, after all, you are frightened!”

“Terribly.”

“A little danger adds to the zest of things. You know what Nietzsche says about that.”

“I am not fond of Nietzsche.” Then, with an effort: “What does he say?”

“Two things are wanted by the true man—danger and play. Therefore he seeketh woman as the most dangerous of toys.”

“Women are dangerous only when you think of them as toys. When a man finds that a woman can reason,—do anything but feel,—he regards her as a menace. But the reasoning woman is really less dangerous than the other sort.”

This was more like the real thing. To talk careful abstractions like this, with beneath each abstraction its concealed personal application, to talk of woman and look in her eyes, to discuss new philosophies with their freedoms, to discard old creeds and old moralities—that was his game. Wilson became content, interested again. The girl was nimble-minded. She challenged his philosophy and gave him a chance to defend it. With the conviction, as their meal went on, that Le Moyne and his companion must surely have gone, she gained ease.

It was only by wild driving that she got back to the hospital by ten o’clock.

Wilson left her at the corner, well content with himself. He had had the rest he needed in congenial company. The girl stimulated his interest. She was mental, but not too mental. And he approved of his own attitude. He had been discreet. Even if she talked, there was nothing to tell. But he felt confident that she would not talk.

As he drove up the Street, he glanced across at the Page house. Sidney was there on the doorstep, talking to a tall man who stood below and looked up at her. Wilson settled his tie, in the darkness. Sidney was a mighty pretty girl. The June night was in his blood. He was sorry he had not kissed Carlotta good-night. He rather thought, now he looked back, she had expected it.

As he got out of his car at the curb, a young man who had been standing in the shadow of the tree-box moved quickly away.

Wilson smiled after him in the darkness.

“That you, Joe?” he called.

But the boy went on.

CHAPTER VIII

Sidney entered the hospital as a probationer early in August. Christine was to be married in September to Palmer Howe, and, with Harriet and K. in the house, she felt that she could safely leave her mother.

The balcony outside the parlor was already under way. On the night before she went away, Sidney took chairs out there and sat with her mother until the dew drove Anna to the lamp in the sewing-room and her “Daily Thoughts” reading.

Sidney sat alone and viewed her world from this new and pleasant angle. She could see the garden and the whitewashed fence with its morning-glories, and at the same time, by turning her head, view the Wilson house across the Street. She looked mostly at the Wilson house.

K. Le Moyne was upstairs in his room. She could hear him tramping up and down, and catch, occasionally, the bitter-sweet odor of his old brier pipe.

All the small loose ends of her life were gathered up—except Joe. She would have liked to get that clear, too. She wanted him to know how she felt about it all: that she liked him as much as ever, that she did not want to hurt him. But she wanted to make it clear, too, that she knew now that she would never marry him. She thought she would never marry; but, if she did, it would be a man doing a man’s work in the world. Her eyes turned wistfully to the house across the Street.

K.‘s lamp still burned overhead, but his restless tramping about had ceased. He must be reading—he read a great deal. She really ought to go to bed. A neighborhood cat came stealthily across the Street, and stared up at the little balcony with green-glowing eyes.

“Come on, Bill Taft,” she said. “Reginald is gone, so you are welcome. Come on.”

Joe Drummond, passing the house for the fourth time that evening, heard her voice, and hesitated uncertainly on the pavement.

“That you, Sid?” he called softly.

“Joe! Come in.”

“It’s late; I’d better get home.”

The misery in his voice hurt her.

“I’ll not keep you long. I want to talk to you.”

He came slowly toward her.

“Well?” he said hoarsely.

“You’re not very kind to me, Joe.”

“My God!” said poor Joe. “Kind to you! Isn’t the kindest thing I can do to keep out of your way?”

“Not if you are hating me all the time.”

“I don’t hate you.”

“Then why haven’t you been to see me? If I have done anything—” Her voice was a-tingle with virtue and outraged friendship.

“You haven’t done anything but—show me where I get off.”

He sat down on the edge of the balcony and stared out blankly.

“If that’s the way you feel about it—”

“I’m not blaming you. I was a fool to think you’d ever care about me. I don’t know that I feel so bad—about the thing. I’ve been around seeing some other girls, and I notice they’re glad to see me, and treat me right, too.” There was boyish bravado in his voice. “But what makes me sick is to have everyone saying you’ve jilted me.”

“Good gracious! Why, Joe, I never promised.”

“Well, we look at it in different ways; that’s all. I took it for a promise.”

Then suddenly all his carefully conserved indifference fled. He bent forward quickly and, catching her hand, held it against his lips.

“I’m crazy about you, Sidney. That’s the truth. I wish I could die!”

The cat, finding no active antagonism, sprang up on the balcony and rubbed against the boy’s quivering shoulders; a breath of air stroked the morning-glory vine like the touch of a friendly hand. Sidney, facing for the first time the enigma of love and despair sat, rather frightened, in her chair.

“You don’t mean that!”

“I mean it, all right. If it wasn’t for the folks, I’d jump in the river. I lied when I said I’d been to see other girls. What do I want with other girls? I want you!”

“I’m not worth all that.”

“No girl’s worth what I’ve been going through,” he retorted bitterly. “But that doesn’t help any. I don’t eat; I don’t sleep—I’m afraid sometimes of the way I feel. When I saw you at the White Springs with that roomer chap—”

“Ah! You were there!”

“If I’d had a gun I’d have killed him. I thought—” So far, out of sheer pity, she had left her hand in his. Now she drew it away.

“This is wild, silly talk. You’ll be sorry tomorrow.”

“It’s the truth,” doggedly.

But he made a clutch at his self-respect. He was acting like a crazy boy, and he was a man, all of twenty-two!

“When are you going to the hospital?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Is that Wilson’s hospital?”

“Yes.”

Alas for his resolve! The red haze of jealousy came again. “You’ll be seeing him every day, I suppose.”

“I dare say. I shall also be seeing twenty or thirty other doctors, and a hundred or so men patients, not to mention visitors. Joe, you’re not rational.”

“No,” he said heavily, “I’m not. If it’s got to be someone, Sidney, I’d rather have it the roomer upstairs than Wilson. There’s a lot of talk about Wilson.”

“It isn’t necessary to malign my friends.” He rose.

“I thought perhaps, since you are going away, you would let me keep Reginald. He’d be something to remember you by.”

“One would think I was about to die! I set Reginald free that day in the country. I’m sorry, Joe. You’ll come to see me now and then, won’t you?”

“If I do, do you think you may change your mind?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“I’ve got to fight this out alone, and the less I see of you the better.” But his next words belied his intention. “And Wilson had better lookout. I’ll be watching. If I see him playing any of his tricks around you—well, he’d better look out!”

That, as it turned out, was Joe’s farewell. He had reached the breaking-point. He gave her a long look, blinked, and walked rapidly out to the Street. Some of the dignity of his retreat was lost by the fact that the cat followed him, close at his heels.

Sidney was hurt, greatly troubled. If this was love, she did not want it—this strange compound of suspicion and despair, injured pride and threats. Lovers in fiction were of two classes—the accepted ones, who loved and trusted, and the rejected ones, who took themselves away in despair, but at least took themselves away. The thought of a future with Joe always around a corner, watching her, obsessed her. She felt aggrieved, insulted. She even shed a tear or two, very surreptitiously; and then, being human and much upset, and the cat startling her by its sudden return and selfish advances, she shooed it off the veranda and set an imaginary dog after it. Whereupon, feeling somewhat better, she went in and locked the balcony window and proceeded upstairs.

Le Moyne’s light was still going. The rest of the household slept. She paused outside the door.

“Are you sleepy?”—very softly.

There was a movement inside, the sound of a book put down. Then: “No, indeed.”

“I may not see you in the morning. I leave tomorrow.”

“Just a minute.”

From the sounds, she judged that he was putting on his shabby gray coat. The next moment he had opened the door and stepped out into the corridor.

“I believe you had forgotten!”

“I? Certainly not. I started downstairs a while ago, but you had a visitor.”

“Only Joe Drummond.”

He gazed down at her quizzically.

“And—is Joe more reasonable?”

“He will be. He knows now that I—that I shall not marry him.”

“Poor chap! He’ll buck up, of course. But it’s a little hard just now.”

“I believe you think I should have married him.”

“I am only putting myself in his place and realizing—When do you leave?”

“Just after breakfast.”

“I am going very early. Perhaps—”

He hesitated. Then, hurriedly:—

“I got a little present for you—nothing much, but your mother was quite willing. In fact, we bought it together.”

He went back into his room, and returned with a small box.

“With all sorts of good luck,” he said, and placed it in her hands.

“How dear of you! And may I look now?”

“I wish you would. Because, if you would rather have something else—”

She opened the box with excited fingers. Ticking away on its satin bed was a small gold watch.

“You’ll need it, you see,” he explained nervously, “It wasn’t extravagant under the circumstances. Your mother’s watch, which you had intended to take, had no second-hand. You’ll need a second-hand to take pulses, you know.”

“A watch,” said Sidney, eyes on it. “A dear little watch, to pin on and not put in a pocket. Why, you’re the best person!”

“I was afraid you might think it presumptuous,” he said. “I haven’t any right, of course. I thought of flowers—but they fade and what have you? You said that, you know, about Joe’s roses. And then, your mother said you wouldn’t be offended—”

“Don’t apologize for making me so happy!” she cried. “It’s wonderful, really. And the little hand is for pulses! How many queer things you know!”

After that she must pin it on, and slip in to stand before his mirror and inspect the result. It gave Le Moyne a queer thrill to see her there in the room among his books and his pipes. It make him a little sick, too, in view of tomorrow and the thousand-odd tomorrows when she would not be there.

“I’ve kept you up shamefully,’” she said at last, “and you get up so early. I shall write you a note from the hospital, delivering a little lecture on extravagance—because how can I now, with this joy shining on me? And about how to keep Katie in order about your socks, and all sorts of things. And—and now, good-night.”

She had moved to the door, and he followed her, stooping a little to pass under the low chandelier.

“Good-night,” said Sidney.

“Good-bye—and God bless you.”

She went out, and he closed the door softly behind her.

CHAPTER IX

Sidney never forgot her early impressions of the hospital, although they were chaotic enough at first. There were uniformed young women coming and going, efficient, cool-eyed, low of voice. There were medicine-closets with orderly rows of labeled bottles, linen-rooms with great stacks of sheets and towels, long vistas of shining floors and lines of beds. There were brisk internes with duck clothes and brass buttons, who eyed her with friendly, patronizing glances. There were bandages and dressings, and great white screens behind which were played little or big dramas, baths or deaths, as the case might be. And over all brooded the mysterious authority of the superintendent of the training-school, dubbed the Head, for short.

Twelve hours a day, from seven to seven, with the off-duty intermission, Sidney labored at tasks which revolted her soul. She swept and dusted the wards, cleaned closets, folded sheets and towels, rolled bandages—did everything but nurse the sick, which was what she had come to do.

At night she did not go home. She sat on the edge of her narrow white bed and soaked her aching feet in hot water and witch hazel, and practiced taking pulses on her own slender wrist, with K.‘s little watch.

Out of all the long, hot days, two periods stood out clearly, to be waited for and cherished. One was when, early in the afternoon, with the ward in spotless order, the shades drawn against the August sun, the tables covered with their red covers, and the only sound the drone of the bandage-machine as Sidney steadily turned it, Dr. Max passed the door on his way to the surgical ward beyond, and gave her a cheery greeting. At these times Sidney’s heart beat almost in time with the ticking of the little watch.

The other hour was at twilight, when, work over for the day, the night nurse, with her rubber-soled shoes and tired eyes and jangling keys, having reported and received the night orders, the nurses gathered in their small parlor for prayers. It was months before Sidney got over the exaltation of that twilight hour, and never did it cease to bring her healing and peace. In a way, it crystallized for her what the day’s work meant: charity and its sister, service, the promise of rest and peace. Into the little parlor filed the nurses, and knelt, folding their tired hands.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” read the Head out of her worn Bible; “I shall not want.”

And the nurses: “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.”

And so on through the psalm to the assurance at the end, “And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” Now and then there was a death behind one of the white screens. It caused little change in the routine of the ward. A nurse stayed behind the screen, and her work was done by the others. When everything was over, the time was recorded exactly on the record, and the body was taken away.

At first it seemed to Sidney that she could not stand this nearness to death. She thought the nurses hard because they took it quietly. Then she found that it was only stoicism, resignation, that they had learned. These things must be, and the work must go on. Their philosophy made them no less tender. Some such patient detachment must be that of the angels who keep the Great Record.

On her first Sunday half-holiday she was free in the morning, and went to church with her mother, going back to the hospital after the service. So it was two weeks before she saw Le Moyne again. Even then, it was only for a short time. Christine and Palmer Howe came in to see her, and to inspect the balcony, now finished.

But Sidney and Le Moyne had a few words together first.

There was a change in Sidney. Le Moyne was quick to see it. She was a trifle subdued, with a puzzled look in her blue eyes. Her mouth was tender, as always, but he thought it drooped. There was a new atmosphere of wistfulness about the girl that made his heart ache.

They were alone in the little parlor with its brown lamp and blue silk shade, and its small nude Eve—which Anna kept because it had been a gift from her husband, but retired behind a photograph of the minister, so that only the head and a bare arm holding the apple appeared above the reverend gentleman.

K. never smoked in the parlor, but by sheer force of habit he held the pipe in his teeth.

“And how have things been going?” asked Sidney practically.

“Your steward has little to report. Aunt Harriet, who left you her love, has had the complete order for the Lorenz trousseau. She and I have picked out a stunning design for the wedding dress. I thought I’d ask you about the veil. We’re rather in a quandary. Do you like this new fashion of draping the veil from behind the coiffure in the back—”

Sidney had been sitting on the edge of her chair, staring.

“There,” she said—“I knew it! This house is fatal! They’re making an old woman of you already.” Her tone was tragic.

“Miss Lorenz likes the new method, but my personal preference is for the old way, with the bride’s face covered.”

He sucked calmly at his dead pipe.

“Katie has a new prescription—recipe—for bread. It has more bread and fewer air-holes. One cake of yeast—”

Sidney sprang to her feet.

“It’s perfectly terrible!” she cried. “Because you rent a room in this house is no reason why you should give up your personality and your—intelligence. Not but that it’s good for you. But Katie has made bread without masculine assistance for a good many years, and if Christine can’t decide about her own veil she’d better not get married. Mother says you water the flowers every evening, and lock up the house before you go to bed. I—I never meant you to adopt the family!”

K. removed his pipe and gazed earnestly into the bowl.

“Bill Taft has had kittens under the porch,” he said. “And the groceryman has been sending short weight. We’ve bought scales now, and weigh everything.”

“You are evading the question.”

“Dear child, I am doing these things because I like to do them. For—for some time I’ve been floating, and now I’ve got a home. Every time I lock up the windows at night, or cut a picture out of a magazine as a suggestion to your Aunt Harriet, it’s an anchor to windward.”

Sidney gazed helplessly at his imperturbable face. He seemed older than she had recalled him: the hair over his ears was almost white. And yet, he was just thirty. That was Palmer Howe’s age, and Palmer seemed like a boy. But he held himself more erect than he had in the first days of his occupancy of the second-floor front.

“And now,” he said cheerfully, “what about yourself? You’ve lost a lot of illusions, of course, but perhaps you’ve gained ideals. That’s a step.”

“Life,” observed Sidney, with the wisdom of two weeks out in the world, “life is a terrible thing, K. We think we’ve got it, and—it’s got us.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“When I think of how simple I used to think it all was! One grew up and got married, and—and perhaps had children. And when one got very old, one died. Lately, I’ve been seeing that life really consists of exceptions—children who don’t grow up, and grown-ups who die before they are old. And”—this took an effort, but she looked at him squarely—“and people who have children, but are not married. It all rather hurts.”

“All knowledge that is worth while hurts in the getting.”

Sidney got up and wandered around the room, touching its little familiar objects with tender hands. K. watched her. There was this curious element in his love for her, that when he was with her it took on the guise of friendship and deceived even himself. It was only in the lonely hours that it took on truth, became a hopeless yearning for the touch of her hand or a glance from her clear eyes.

Sidney, having picked up the minister’s picture, replaced it absently, so that Eve stood revealed in all her pre-apple innocence.

“There is something else,” she said absently. “I cannot talk it over with mother. There is a girl in the ward—”

“A patient?”

“Yes. She is quite pretty. She has had typhoid, but she is a little better. She’s—not a good person.”

“I see.”

“At first I couldn’t bear to go near her. I shivered when I had to straighten her bed. I—I’m being very frank, but I’ve got to talk this out with someone. I worried a lot about it, because, although at first I hated her, now I don’t. I rather like her.”

She looked at K. defiantly, but there was no disapproval in his eyes.

“Yes.”

“Well, this is the question. She’s getting better. She’ll be able to go out soon. Don’t you think something ought to be done to keep her from—going back?”

There was a shadow in K.‘s eyes now. She was so young to face all this; and yet, since face it she must, how much better to have her do it squarely.

“Does she want to change her mode of life?”

“I don’t know, of course. There are some things one doesn’t discuss. She cares a great deal for some man. The other day I propped her up in bed and gave her a newspaper, and after a while I found the paper on the floor, and she was crying. The other patients avoid her, and it was some time before I noticed it. The next day she told me that the man was going to marry some one else. ‘He wouldn’t marry me, of course,’ she said; ‘but he might have told me.’”

Le Moyne did his best, that afternoon in the little parlor, to provide Sidney with a philosophy to carry her through her training. He told her that certain responsibilities were hers, but that she could not reform the world. Broad charity, tenderness, and healing were her province.

“Help them all you can,” he finished, feeling inadequate and hopelessly didactic. “Cure them; send them out with a smile; and—leave the rest to the Almighty.”

Sidney was resigned, but not content. Newly facing the evil of the world, she was a rampant reformer at once. Only the arrival of Christine and her fiance saved his philosophy from complete rout. He had time for a question between the ring of the bell and Katie’s deliberate progress from the kitchen to the front door.

“How about the surgeon, young Wilson? Do you ever see him?” His tone was carefully casual.

“Almost every day. He stops at the door of the ward and speaks to me. It makes me quite distinguished, for a probationer. Usually, you know, the staff never even see the probationers.”

“And—the glamour persists?” He smiled down at her.

“I think he is very wonderful,” said Sidney valiantly.

Christine Lorenz, while not large, seemed to fill the little room. Her voice, which was frequent and penetrating, her smile, which was wide and showed very white teeth that were a trifle large for beauty, her all-embracing good nature, dominated the entire lower floor. K., who had met her before, retired into silence and a corner. Young Howe smoked a cigarette in the hall.

“You poor thing!” said Christine, and put her cheek against Sidney’s. “Why, you’re positively thin! Palmer gives you a month to tire of it all; but I said—”

“I take that back,” Palmer spoke indolently from the corridor. “There is the look of willing martyrdom in her face. Where is Reginald? I’ve brought some nuts for him.”

“Reginald is back in the woods again.”

“Now, look here,” he said solemnly. “When we arranged about these rooms, there were certain properties that went with them—the lady next door who plays Paderewski’s ‘Minuet’ six hours a day, and K. here, and Reginald. If you must take something to the woods, why not the minuet person?”

Howe was a good-looking man, thin, smooth-shaven, aggressively well dressed. This Sunday afternoon, in a cutaway coat and high hat, with an English malacca stick, he was just a little out of the picture. The Street said that he was “wild,” and that to get into the Country Club set Christine was losing more than she was gaining.

Christine had stepped out on the balcony, and was speaking to K. just inside.

“It’s rather a queer way to live, of course,” she said. “But Palmer is a pauper, practically. We are going to take our meals at home for a while. You see, certain things that we want we can’t have if we take a house—a car, for instance. We’ll need one for running out to the Country Club to dinner. Of course, unless father gives me one for a wedding present, it will be a cheap one. And we’re getting the Rosenfeld boy to drive it. He’s crazy about machinery, and he’ll come for practically nothing.”

K. had never known a married couple to take two rooms and go to the bride’s mother’s for meals in order to keep a car. He looked faintly dazed. Also, certain sophistries of his former world about a cheap chauffeur being costly in the end rose in his mind and were carefully suppressed.

“You’ll find a car a great comfort, I’m sure,” he said politely.

Christine considered K. rather distinguished. She liked his graying hair and steady eyes, and insisted on considering his shabbiness a pose. She was conscious that she made a pretty picture in the French window, and preened herself like a bright bird.

“You’ll come out with us now and then, I hope.”

“Thank you.”

“Isn’t it odd to think that we are going to be practically one family!”

“Odd, but very pleasant.”

He caught the flash of Christine’s smile, and smiled back. Christine was glad she had decided to take the rooms, glad that K. lived there. This thing of marriage being the end of all things was absurd. A married woman should have men friends; they kept her up. She would take him to the Country Club. The women would be mad to know him. How clean-cut his profile was!

Across the Street, the Rosenfeld boy had stopped by Dr. Wilson’s car, and was eyeing it with the cool, appraising glance of the street boy whose sole knowledge of machinery has been acquired from the clothes-washer at home. Joe Drummond, eyes carefully ahead, went up the Street. Tillie, at Mrs. McKee’s, stood in the doorway and fanned herself with her apron. Max Wilson came out of the house and got into his car. For a minute, perhaps, all the actors, save Carlotta and Dr. Ed, were on the stage. It was that bete noir of the playwright, an ensemble; K. Le Moyne and Sidney, Palmer Howe, Christine, Tillie, the younger Wilson, Joe, even young Rosenfeld, all within speaking distance, almost touching distance, gathered within and about the little house on a side street which K. at first grimly and now tenderly called “home.”

CHAPTER X

On Monday morning, shortly after the McKee prolonged breakfast was over, a small man of perhaps fifty, with iron-gray hair and a sparse goatee, made his way along the Street. He moved with the air of one having a definite destination but a by no means definite reception.

As he walked along he eyed with a professional glance the ailanthus and maple trees which, with an occasional poplar, lined the Street. At the door of Mrs. McKee’s boarding-house he stopped. Owing to a slight change in the grade of the street, the McKee house had no stoop, but one flat doorstep. Thus it was possible to ring the doorbell from the pavement, and this the stranger did. It gave him a curious appearance of being ready to cut and run if things were unfavorable.

For a moment things were indeed unfavorable. Mrs. McKee herself opened the door. She recognized him at once, but no smile met the nervous one that formed itself on the stranger’s face.

“Oh, it’s you, is it?”

“It’s me, Mrs. McKee.”

“Well?”

He made a conciliatory effort.

“I was thinking, as I came along,” he said, “that you and the neighbors had better get after these here caterpillars. Look at them maples, now.”

“If you want to see Tillie, she’s busy.”

“I only want to say how-d ‘ye-do. I’m just on my way through town.”

“I’ll say it for you.”

A certain doggedness took the place of his tentative smile.

“I’ll say it to myself, I guess. I don’t want any unpleasantness, but I’ve come a good ways to see her and I’ll hang around until I do.”

Mrs. McKee knew herself routed, and retreated to the kitchen.

“You’re wanted out front,” she said.

“Who is it?”

“Never mind. Only, my advice to you is, don’t be a fool.”

Tillie went suddenly pale. The hands with which she tied a white apron over her gingham one were shaking.

Her visitor had accepted the open door as permission to enter and was standing in the hall.

He went rather white himself when he saw Tillie coming toward him down the hall. He knew that for Tillie this visit would mean that he was free—and he was not free. Sheer terror of his errand filled him.

“Well, here I am, Tillie.”

“All dressed up and highly perfumed!” said poor Tillie, with the question in her eyes. “You’re quite a stranger, Mr. Schwitter.”

“I was passing through, and I just thought I’d call around and tell you—My God, Tillie, I’m glad to see you!”

She made no reply, but opened the door into the cool and, shaded little parlor. He followed her in and closed the door behind him.

“I couldn’t help it. I know I promised.”

“Then she—?”

“She’s still living. Playing with paper dolls—that’s the latest.”

Tillie sat down suddenly on one of the stiff chairs. Her lips were as white as her face.

“I thought, when I saw you—”

“I was afraid you’d think that.”

Neither spoke for a moment. Tillie’s hands twisted nervously in her lap. Mr. Schwitter’s eyes were fixed on the window, which looked back on the McKee yard.

“That spiraea back there’s not looking very good. If you’ll save the cigar butts around here and put them in water, and spray it, you’ll kill the lice.”

Tillie found speech at last.

“I don’t know why you come around bothering me,” she said dully. “I’ve been getting along all right; now you come and upset everything.”

Mr. Schwitter rose and took a step toward her.

“Well, I’ll tell you why I came. Look at me. I ain’t getting any younger, am I? Time’s going on, and I’m wanting you all the time. And what am I getting? What’ve I got out of life, anyhow? I’m lonely, Tillie!”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“You’re lonely, too, ain’t you?”

“Me? I haven’t got time to be. And, anyhow, there’s always a crowd here.”

“You can be lonely in a crowd, and I guess—is there any one around here you like better than me?”

“Oh, what’s the use!” cried poor Tillie. “We can talk our heads off and not get anywhere. You’ve got a wife living, and, unless you intend to do away with her, I guess that’s all there is to it.”

“Is that all, Tillie? Haven’t you got a right to be happy?”

She was quick of wit, and she read his tone as well as his words.

“You get out of here—and get out quick!”

She had jumped to her feet; but he only looked at her with understanding eyes.

“I know,” he said. “That’s the way I thought of it at first. Maybe I’ve just got used to the idea, but it doesn’t seem so bad to me now. Here are you, drudging for other people when you ought to have a place all your own—and not gettin’ younger any more than I am. Here’s both of us lonely. I’d be a good husband to you, Till—because, whatever it’d be in law, I’d be your husband before God.”

Tillie cowered against the door, her eyes on his. Here before her, embodied in this man, stood all that she had wanted and never had. He meant a home, tenderness, children, perhaps. He turned away from the look in her eyes and stared out of the front window.

“Them poplars out there ought to be taken away,” he said heavily. “They’re hell on sewers.”

Tillie found her voice at last:—

“I couldn’t do it, Mr. Schwitter. I guess I’m a coward. Maybe I’ll be sorry.”

“Perhaps, if you got used to the idea—”

“What’s that to do with the right and wrong of it?”

“Maybe I’m queer. It don’t seem like wrongdoing to me. It seems to me that the Lord would make an exception of us if He knew the circumstances. Perhaps, after you get used to the idea—What I thought was like this. I’ve got a little farm about seven miles from the city limits, and the tenant on it says that nearly every Sunday somebody motors out from town and wants a chicken-and-waffle supper. There ain’t much in the nursery business anymore. These landscape fellows buy their stuff direct, and the middleman’s out. I’ve got a good orchard, and there’s a spring, so I could put running water in the house. I’d be good to you, Tillie,—I swear it. It’d be just the same as marriage. Nobody need know it.”

“You’d know it. You wouldn’t respect me.”

“Don’t a man respect a woman that’s got courage enough to give up everything for him?”

Tillie was crying softly into her apron. He put a work-hardened hand on her head.

“It isn’t as if I’d run around after women,” he said. “You’re the only one, since Maggie—” He drew a long breath. “I’ll give you time to think it over. Suppose I stop in tomorrow morning. It doesn’t commit you to anything to talk it over.”

There had been no passion in the interview, and there was none in the touch of his hand. He was not young, and the tragic loneliness of approaching old age confronted him. He was trying to solve his problem and Tillie’s, and what he had found was no solution, but a compromise.

“Tomorrow morning, then,” he said quietly, and went out the door.

All that hot August morning Tillie worked in a daze. Mrs. McKee watched her and said nothing. She interpreted the girl’s white face and set lips as the result of having had to dismiss Schwitter again, and looked for time to bring peace, as it had done before.

Le Moyne came late to his midday meal. For once, the mental anaesthesia of endless figures had failed him. On his way home he had drawn his small savings from the bank, and mailed them, in cash and registered, to a back street in the slums of a distant city. He had done this before, and always with a feeling of exaltation, as if, for a time at least, the burden he carried was lightened. But to-day he experienced no compensatory relief. Life was dull and stale to him, effort ineffectual. At thirty a man should look back with tenderness, forward with hope. K. Le Moyne dared not look back, and had no desire to look ahead into empty years.

Although he ate little, the dining-room was empty when he finished. Usually he had some cheerful banter for Tillie, to which she responded in kind. But, what with the heat and with heaviness of spirit, he did not notice her depression until he rose.

“Why, you’re not sick, are you, Tillie?”

“Me? Oh, no. Low in my mind, I guess.”

“It’s the heat. It’s fearful. Look here. If I send you two tickets to a roof garden where there’s a variety show, can’t you take a friend and go tonight?”

“Thanks; I guess I’ll not go out.”

Then, unexpectedly, she bent her head against a chair-back and fell to silent crying. K. let her cry for a moment. Then:—

“Now—tell me about it.”

“I’m just worried; that’s all.”

“Let’s see if we can’t fix up the worries. Come, now, out with them!”

“I’m a wicked woman, Mr. Le Moyne.”

“Then I’m the person to tell it to. I—I’m pretty much a lost soul myself.”

He put an arm over her shoulders and drew her up, facing him.

“Suppose we go into the parlor and talk it out. I’ll bet things are not as bad as you imagine.”

But when, in the parlor that had seen Mr. Schwitter’s strange proposal of the morning, Tillie poured out her story, K.‘s face grew grave.

“The wicked part is that I want to go with him,” she finished. “I keep thinking about being out in the country, and him coming into supper, and everything nice for him and me cleaned up and waiting—O my God! I’ve always been a good woman until now.”

“I—I understand a great deal better than you think I do. You’re not wicked. The only thing is—”

“Go on. Hit me with it.”

“You might go on and be very happy. And as for the—for his wife, it won’t do her any harm. It’s only—if there are children.”

“I know. I’ve thought of that. But I’m so crazy for children!”

“Exactly. So you should be. But when they come, and you cannot give them a name—don’t you see? I’m not preaching morality. God forbid that I—But no happiness is built on a foundation of wrong. It’s been tried before, Tillie, and it doesn’t pan out.”

He was conscious of a feeling of failure when he left her at last. She had acquiesced in what he said, knew he was right, and even promised to talk to him again before making a decision one way or the other. But against his abstractions of conduct and morality there was pleading in Tillie the hungry mother-heart; law and creed and early training were fighting against the strongest instinct of the race. It was a losing battle.

CHAPTER XI

The hot August days dragged on. Merciless sunlight beat in through the slatted shutters of ward windows. At night, from the roof to which the nurses retired after prayers for a breath of air, lower surrounding roofs were seen to be covered with sleepers. Children dozed precariously on the edge of eternity; men and women sprawled in the grotesque postures of sleep.

There was a sort of feverish irritability in the air. Even the nurses, stoically unmindful of bodily discomfort, spoke curtly or not at all. Miss Dana, in Sidney’s ward, went down with a low fever, and for a day or so Sidney and Miss Grange got along as best they could. Sidney worked like two or more, performed marvels of bed-making, learned to give alcohol baths for fever with the maximum of result and the minimum of time, even made rounds with a member of the staff and came through creditably.

Dr. Ed Wilson had sent a woman patient into the ward, and his visits were the breath of life to the girl.

“How’re they treating you?” he asked her, one day, abruptly.

“Very well.”

“Look at me squarely. You’re pretty and you’re young. Some of them will try to take it out of you. That’s human nature. Has anyone tried it yet?”

Sidney looked distressed.

“Positively, no. It’s been hot, and of course it’s troublesome to tell me everything. I—I think they’re all very kind.”

He reached out a square, competent hand, and put it over hers.

“We miss you in the Street,” he said. “It’s all sort of dead there since you left. Joe Drummond doesn’t moon up and down any more, for one thing. What was wrong between you and Joe, Sidney?”

“I didn’t want to marry him; that’s all.”

“That’s considerable. The boy’s taking it hard.”

Then, seeing her face:—

“But you’re right, of course. Don’t marry anyone unless you can’t live without him. That’s been my motto, and here I am, still single.”

He went out and down the corridor. He had known Sidney all his life. During the lonely times when Max was at college and in Europe, he had watched her grow from a child to a young girl. He did not suspect for a moment that in that secret heart of hers he sat newly enthroned, in a glow of white light, as Max’s brother; that the mere thought that he lived in Max’s house (it was, of course Max’s house to her), sat at Max’s breakfast table, could see him whenever he wished, made the touch of his hand on hers a benediction and a caress.

Sidney finished folding linen and went back to the ward. It was Friday and a visiting day. Almost every bed had its visitor beside it; but Sidney, running an eye over the ward, found the girl of whom she had spoken to Le Moyne quite alone. She was propped up in bed, reading; but at each new step in the corridor hope would spring into her eyes and die again.

“Want anything, Grace?”

“Me? I’m all right. If these people would only get out and let me read in peace—Say, sit down and talk to me, won’t you? It beats the mischief the way your friends forget you when you’re laid up in a place like this.”

“People can’t always come at visiting hours. Besides, it’s hot.”

“A girl I knew was sick here last year, and it wasn’t too hot for me to trot in twice a week with a bunch of flowers for her. Do you think she’s been here once? She hasn’t.”

Then, suddenly:—

“You know that man I told you about the other day?”

Sidney nodded. The girl’s anxious eyes were on her.

“It was a shock to me, that’s all. I didn’t want you to think I’d break my heart over any fellow. All I meant was, I wished he’d let me know.”

Her eyes searched Sidney’s. They looked unnaturally large and somber in her face. Her hair had been cut short, and her nightgown, open at the neck, showed her thin throat and prominent clavicles.

“You’re from the city, aren’t you, Miss Page?”

“Yes.”

“You told me the street, but I’ve forgotten it.”

Sidney repeated the name of the Street, and slipped a fresh pillow under the girl’s head.

“The evening paper says there’s a girl going to be married on your street.”

“Really! Oh, I think I know. A friend of mine is going to be married. Was the name Lorenz?”

“The girl’s name was Lorenz. I—I don’t remember the man’s name.”

“She is going to marry a Mr. Howe,” said Sidney briskly. “Now, how do you feel? More comfy?”

“Fine! I suppose you’ll be going to that wedding?”

“If I ever get time to have a dress made, I’ll surely go.”

Toward six o’clock the next morning, the night nurse was making out her reports. On one record, which said at the top, “Grace Irving, age 19,” and an address which, to the initiated, told all her story, the night nurse wrote:—

“Did not sleep at all during night. Face set and eyes staring, but complains of no pain. Refused milk at eleven and three.”

Carlotta Harrison, back from her vacation, reported for duty the next morning, and was assigned to E ward, which was Sidney’s. She gave Sidney a curt little nod, and proceeded to change the entire routine with the thoroughness of a Central American revolutionary president. Sidney, who had yet to learn that with some people authority can only assert itself by change, found herself confused, at sea, half resentful.

Once she ventured a protest:—

“I’ve been taught to do it that way, Miss Harrison. If my method is wrong, show me what you want, and I’ll do my best.”

“I am not responsible for what you have been taught. And you will not speak back when you are spoken to.”

Small as the incident was, it marked a change in Sidney’s position in the ward. She got the worst off-duty of the day, or none. Small humiliations were hers: late meals, disagreeable duties, endless and often unnecessary tasks. Even Miss Grange, now reduced to second place, remonstrated with her senior.

“I think a certain amount of severity is good for a probationer,” she said, “but you are brutal, Miss Harrison.”

“She’s stupid.”

“She’s not at all stupid. She’s going to be one of the best nurses in the house.”

“Report me, then. Tell the Head I’m abusing Dr. Wilson’s pet probationer, that I don’t always say ‘please’ when I ask her to change a bed or take a temperature.”

Miss Grange was not lacking in keenness. She died not go to the Head, which is unethical under any circumstances; but gradually there spread through the training-school a story that Carlotta Harrison was jealous of the new Page girl, Dr. Wilson’s protegee. Things were still highly unpleasant in the ward, but they grew much better when Sidney was off duty. She was asked to join a small class that was studying French at night. As ignorant of the cause of her popularity as of the reason of her persecution, she went steadily on her way.

And she was gaining every day. Her mind was forming. She was learning to think for herself. For the first time, she was facing problems and demanding an answer. Why must there be Grace Irvings in the world? Why must the healthy babies of the obstetric ward go out to the slums and come back, in months or years, crippled for the great fight by the handicap of their environment, rickety, tuberculous, twisted? Why need the huge mills feed the hospitals daily with injured men?

And there were other things that she thought of. Every night, on her knees in the nurses’ parlor at prayers, she promised, if she were accepted as a nurse, to try never to become calloused, never to regard her patients as “cases,” never to allow the cleanliness and routine of her ward to delay a cup of water to the thirsty, or her arms to a sick child.

On the whole, the world was good, she found. And, of all the good things in it, the best was service. True, there were hot days and restless nights, weary feet, and now and then a heartache. There was Miss Harrison, too. But to offset these there was the sound of Dr. Max’s step in the corridor, and his smiling nod from the door; there was a “God bless you” now and then for the comfort she gave; there were wonderful nights on the roof under the stars, until K.‘s little watch warned her to bed.

While Sidney watched the stars from her hospital roof, while all around her the slum children, on other roofs, fought for the very breath of life, others who knew and loved her watched the stars, too. K. was having his own troubles in those days. Late at night, when Anna and Harriet had retired, he sat on the balcony and thought of many things. Anna Page was not well. He had noticed that her lips were rather blue, and had called in Dr. Ed. It was valvular heart disease. Anna was not to be told, or Sidney. It was Harriet’s ruling.

“Sidney can’t help any,” said Harriet, “and for Heaven’s sake let her have her chance. Anna may live for years. You know her as well as I do. If you tell her anything at all, she’ll have Sidney here, waiting on her hand and foot.”

And Le Moyne, fearful of urging too much because his own heart was crying out to have the girl back, assented.

Then, K. was anxious about Joe. The boy did not seem to get over the thing the way he should. Now and then Le Moyne, resuming his old habit of wearying himself into sleep, would walk out into the country. On one such night he had overtaken Joe, tramping along with his head down.

Joe had not wanted his company, had plainly sulked. But Le Moyne had persisted.

“I’ll not talk,” he said; “but, since we’re going the same way, we might as well walk together.”

But after a time Joe had talked, after all. It was not much at first—a feverish complaint about the heat, and that if there was trouble in Mexico he thought he’d go.

“Wait until fall, if you’re thinking of it,” K. advised. “This is tepid compared with what you’ll get down there.”

“I’ve got to get away from here.”

K. nodded understandingly. Since the scene at the White Springs Hotel, both knew that no explanation was necessary.

“It isn’t so much that I mind her turning me down,” Joe said, after a silence. “A girl can’t marry all the men who want her. But I don’t like this hospital idea. I don’t understand it. She didn’t have to go. Sometimes”—he turned bloodshot eyes on Le Moyne—“I think she went because she was crazy about somebody there.”

“She went because she wanted to be useful.”

“She could be useful at home.”

For almost twenty minutes they tramped on without speech. They had made a circle, and the lights of the city were close again. K. stopped and put a kindly hand on Joe’s shoulder.

“A man’s got to stand up under a thing like this, you know. I mean, it mustn’t be a knockout. Keeping busy is a darned good method.”

Joe shook himself free, but without resentment. “I’ll tell you what’s eating me up,” he exploded. “It’s Max Wilson. Don’t talk to me about her going to the hospital to be useful. She’s crazy about him, and he’s as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.”

“Perhaps. But it’s always up to the girl. You know that.”

He felt immeasurably old beside Joe’s boyish blustering—old and rather helpless.

“I’m watching him. Some of these days I’ll get something on him. Then she’ll know what to think of her hero!”

“That’s not quite square, is it?”

“He’s not square.”

Joe had left him then, wheeling abruptly off into the shadows. K. had gone home alone, rather uneasy. There seemed to be mischief in the very air.

CHAPTER XII

Tillie was gone.

Oddly enough, the last person to see her before she left was Harriet Kennedy. On the third day after Mr. Schwitter’s visit, Harriet’s colored maid had announced a visitor.

Harriet’s business instinct had been good. She had taken expensive rooms in a good location, and furnished them with the assistance of a decor store. Then she arranged with a New York house to sell her models on commission.

Her short excursion to New York had marked for Harriet the beginning of a new heaven and a new earth. Here, at last, she found people speaking her own language. She ventured a suggestion to a manufacturer, and found it greeted, not, after the manner of the Street, with scorn, but with approval and some surprise.

“About once in ten years,” said Mr. Arthurs, “we have a woman from out of town bring us a suggestion that is both novel and practical. When we find people like that, we watch them. They climb, madame,—climb.”

Harriet’s climbing was not so rapid as to make her dizzy; but business was coming. The first time she made a price of seventy-five dollars for an evening gown, she went out immediately after and took a drink of water. Her throat was parched.

She began to learn little quips of the feminine mind: that a woman who can pay seventy-five will pay double that sum; that it is not considered good form to show surprise at a dressmaker’s prices, no matter how high they may be; that long mirrors and artificial light help sales—no woman over thirty but was grateful for her pink-and-gray room with its soft lights. And Harriet herself conformed to the picture. She took a lesson from the New York modistes, and wore trailing black gowns. She strapped her thin figure into the best corset she could get, and had her black hair marcelled and dressed high. And, because she was a lady by birth and instinct, the result was not incongruous, but refined and rather impressive.

She took her business home with her at night, lay awake scheming, and wakened at dawn to find fresh color combinations in the early sky. She wakened early because she kept her head tied up in a towel, so that her hair need be done only three times a week. That and the corset were the penalties she paid. Her high-heeled shoes were a torment, too; but in the work-room she kicked them off.

To this new Harriet, then, came Tillie in her distress. Tillie was rather overwhelmed at first. The Street had always considered Harriet “proud.” But Tillie’s urgency was great, her methods direct.

“Why, Tillie!” said Harriet.

“Yes’m.”

“Will you sit down?”

Tillie sat. She was not daunted now. While she worked at the fingers of her silk gloves, what Harriet took for nervousness was pure abstraction.

“It’s very nice of you to come to see me. Do you like my rooms?”

Tillie surveyed the rooms, and Harriet caught her first full view of her face.

“Is there anything wrong? Have you left Mrs. McKee?”

“I think so. I came to talk to you about it.”

It was Harriet’s turn to be overwhelmed.

“She’s very fond of you. If you have had any words—”

“It’s not that. I’m just leaving. I’d like to talk to you, if you don’t mind.”

“Certainly.”

Tillie hitched her chair closer.

“I’m up against something, and I can’t seem to make up my mind. Last night I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to talk to some woman who’s not married, like me, and not as young as she used to be. There’s no use going to Mrs. McKee: she’s a widow, and wouldn’t understand.’”

Harriet’s voice was a trifle sharp as she replied. She never lied about her age, but she preferred to forget it.

“I wish you’d tell me what you’re getting at.”

“It ain’t the sort of thing to come to too sudden. But it’s like this. You and I can pretend all we like, Miss Harriet; but we’re not getting all out of life that the Lord meant us to have. You’ve got them wax figures instead of children, and I have mealers.”

A little spot of color came into Harriet’s cheek. But she was interested. Regardless of the corset, she bent forward.

“Maybe that’s true. Go on.”

“I’m almost forty. Ten years more at the most, and I’m through. I’m slowing up. Can’t get around the tables as I used to. Why, yesterday I put sugar into Mr. Le Moyne’s coffee—well, never mind about that. Now I’ve got a chance to get a home, with a good man to look after me—I like him pretty well, and he thinks a lot of me.”

“Mercy sake, Tillie! You are going to get married?”

“No’m,” said Tillie; “that’s it.” And sat silent for a moment.

The gray curtains with their pink cording swung gently in the open windows. From the work-room came the distant hum of a sewing-machine and the sound of voices. Harriet sat with her hands in her lap and listened while Tillie poured out her story. The gates were down now. She told it all, consistently and with unconscious pathos: her little room under the roof at Mrs. McKee’s, and the house in the country; her loneliness, and the loneliness of the man; even the faint stirrings of potential motherhood, her empty arms, her advancing age—all this she knit into the fabric of her story and laid at Harriet’s feet, as the ancients put their questions to their gods.

Harriet was deeply moved. Too much that Tillie poured out to her found an echo in her own breast. What was this thing she was striving for but a substitute for the real things of life—love and tenderness, children, a home of her own? Quite suddenly she loathed the gray carpet on the floor, the pink chairs, the shaded lamps. Tillie was no longer the waitress at a cheap boarding-house. She loomed large, potential, courageous, a woman who held life in her hands.

“Why don’t you go to Mrs. Rosenfeld? She’s your aunt, isn’t she?”

“She thinks any woman’s a fool to take up with a man.”

“You’re giving me a terrible responsibility, Tillie, if you’re asking my advice.”

“No’m. I’m asking what you’d do if it happened to you. Suppose you had no people that cared anything about you, nobody to disgrace, and all your life nobody had really cared anything about you. And then a chance like this came along. What would you do?”

“I don’t know,” said poor Harriet. “It seems to me—I’m afraid I’d be tempted. It does seem as if a woman had the right to be happy, even if—”

Her own words frightened her. It was as if some hidden self, and not she, had spoken. She hastened to point out the other side of the matter, the insecurity of it, the disgrace. Like K., she insisted that no right can be built out of a wrong. Tillie sat and smoothed her gloves. At last, when Harriet paused in sheer panic, the girl rose.

“I know how you feel, and I don’t want you to take the responsibility of advising me,” she said quietly. “I guess my mind was made up anyhow. But before I did it I just wanted to be sure that a decent woman would think the way I do about it.”

And so, for a time, Tillie went out of the life of the Street as she went out of Harriet’s handsome rooms, quietly, unobtrusively, with calm purpose in her eyes.

There were other changes in the Street. The Lorenz house was being painted for Christine’s wedding. Johnny Rosenfeld, not perhaps of the Street itself, but certainly pertaining to it, was learning to drive Palmer Howe’s new car, in mingled agony and bliss. He walked along the Street, not “right foot, left foot,” but “brake foot, clutch foot,” and took to calling off the vintage of passing cars. “So-and-So 1910,” he would say, with contempt in his voice. He spent more than he could afford on a large streamer, meant to be fastened across the rear of the automobile, which said, “Excuse our dust,” and was inconsolable when Palmer refused to let him use it.

K. had yielded to Anna’s insistence, and was boarding as well as rooming at the Page house. The Street, rather snobbish to its occasional floating population, was accepting and liking him. It found him tender, infinitely human. And in return he found that this seemingly empty eddy into which he had drifted was teeming with life. He busied himself with small things, and found his outlook gradually less tinged with despair. When he found himself inclined to rail, he organized a baseball club, and sent down to everlasting defeat the Linburgs, consisting of cash-boys from Linden and Hofburg’s department store.

The Rosenfelds adored him, with the single exception of the head of the family. The elder Rosenfeld having been “sent up,” it was K. who discovered that by having him consigned to the workhouse his family would receive from the county some sixty-five cents a day for his labor. As this was exactly sixty-five cents a day more than he was worth to them free, Mrs. Rosenfeld voiced the pious hope that he be kept there forever.

K. made no further attempt to avoid Max Wilson. Some day they would meet face to face. He hoped, when it happened, they two might be alone; that was all. Even had he not been bound by his promise to Sidney, flight would have been foolish. The world was a small place, and, one way and another, he had known many people. Wherever he went, there would be the same chance.

And he did not deceive himself. Other things being equal,—the eddy and all that it meant—, he would not willingly take himself out of his small share of Sidney’s life.

She was never to know what she meant to him, of course. He had scourged his heart until it no longer shone in his eyes when he looked at her. But he was very human—not at all meek. There were plenty of days when his philosophy lay in the dust and savage dogs of jealousy tore at it; more than one evening when he threw himself face downward on the bed and lay without moving for hours. And of these periods of despair he was always heartily ashamed the next day.

The meeting with Max Wilson took place early in September, and under better circumstances than he could have hoped for.

Sidney had come home for her weekly visit, and her mother’s condition had alarmed her for the first time. When Le Moyne came home at six o’clock, he found her waiting for him in the hall.

“I am just a little frightened, K.,” she said. “Do you think mother is looking quite well?”

“She has felt the heat, of course. The summer—I often think—”

“Her lips are blue!”

“It’s probably nothing serious.”

“She says you’ve had Dr. Ed over to see her.”

She put her hands on his arm and looked up at him with appeal and something of terror in her face.

Thus cornered, he had to acknowledge that Anna had been out of sorts.

“I shall come home, of course. It’s tragic and absurd that I should be caring for other people, when my own mother—”

She dropped her head on his arm, and he saw that she was crying. If he made a gesture to draw her to him, she never knew it. After a moment she looked up.

“I’m much braver than this in the hospital. But when it’s one’s own!”

K. was sorely tempted to tell her the truth and bring her back to the little house: to their old evenings together, to seeing the younger Wilson, not as the white god of the operating-room and the hospital, but as the dandy of the Street and the neighbor of her childhood—back even to Joe.

But, with Anna’s precarious health and Harriet’s increasing engrossment in her business, he felt it more and more necessary that Sidney go on with her training. A profession was a safeguard. And there was another point: it had been decided that Anna was not to know her condition. If she was not worried she might live for years. There was no surer way to make her suspect it than by bringing Sidney home.

Sidney sent Katie to ask Dr. Ed to come over after dinner. With the sunset Anna seemed better. She insisted on coming downstairs, and even sat with them on the balcony until the stars came out, talking of Christine’s trousseau, and, rather fretfully, of what she would do without the parlors.

“You shall have your own boudoir upstairs,” said Sidney valiantly. “Katie can carry your tray up there. We are going to make the sewing-room into your private sitting-room, and I shall nail the machine-top down.”

This pleased her. When K. insisted on carrying her upstairs, she went in a flutter.

“He is so strong, Sidney!” she said, when he had placed her on her bed. “How can a clerk, bending over a ledger, be so muscular? When I have callers, will it be all right for Katie to show them upstairs?”

She dropped asleep before the doctor came; and when, at something after eight, the door of the Wilson house slammed and a figure crossed the street, it was not Ed at all, but the surgeon.

Sidney had been talking rather more frankly than usual. Lately there had been a reserve about her. K., listening intently that night, read between words a story of small persecutions and jealousies. But the girl minimized them, after her way.

“It’s always hard for probationers,” she said. “I often think Miss Harrison is trying my mettle.”

“Harrison!”

“Carlotta Harrison. And now that Miss Gregg has said she will accept me, it’s really all over. The other nurses are wonderful—so kind and so helpful. I hope I shall look well in my cap.”

Carlotta Harrison was in Sidney’s hospital! A thousand contingencies flashed through his mind. Sidney might grow to like her and bring her to the house. Sidney might insist on the thing she always spoke of—that he visit the hospital; and he would meet her, face to face. He could have depended on a man to keep his secret. This girl with her somber eyes and her threat to pay him out for what had happened to her—she meant danger of a sort that no man could fight.

“Soon,” said Sidney, through the warm darkness, “I shall have a cap, and be always forgetting it and putting my hat on over it—the new ones always do. One of the girls slept in hers the other night! They are tulle, you know, and quite stiff, and it was the most erratic-looking thing the next day!”

It was then that the door across the street closed. Sidney did not hear it, but K. bent forward. There was a part of his brain always automatically on watch.

“I shall get my operating-room training, too,” she went on. “That is the real romance of the hospital. A—a surgeon is a sort of hero in a hospital. You wouldn’t think that, would you? There was a lot of excitement to-day. Even the probationers’ table was talking about it. Dr. Max Wilson did the Edwardes operation.”

The figure across the Street was lighting a cigarette. Perhaps, after all—

“Something tremendously difficult—I don’t know what. It’s going into the medical journals. A Dr. Edwardes invented it, or whatever they call it. They took a picture of the operating-room for the article. The photographer had to put on operating clothes and wrap the camera in sterilized towels. It was the most thrilling thing, they say—”

Her voice died away as her eyes followed K.‘s. Max, cigarette in hand, was coming across, under the ailanthus tree. He hesitated on the pavement, his eyes searching the shadowy balcony.

“Sidney?”

“Here! Right back here!”

There was vibrant gladness in her tone. He came slowly toward them.

“My brother is not at home, so I came over. How select you are, with your balcony!”

“Can you see the step?”

“Coming, with bells on.”

K. had risen and pushed back his chair. His mind was working quickly. Here in the darkness he could hold the situation for a moment. If he could get Sidney into the house, the rest would not matter. Luckily, the balcony was very dark.

“Is any one ill?”

“Mother is not well. This is Mr. Le Moyne, and he knows who you are very well, indeed.”

The two men shook hands.

“I’ve heard a lot of Mr. Le Moyne. Didn’t the Street beat the Linburgs the other day? And I believe the Rosenfelds are in receipt of sixty-five cents a day and considerable peace and quiet through you, Mr. Le Moyne. You’re the most popular man on the Street.”

“I’ve always heard that about YOU. Sidney, if Dr. Wilson is here to see your mother—”

“Going,” said Sidney. “And Dr. Wilson is a very great person, K., so be polite to him.”

Max had roused at the sound of Le Moyne’s voice, not to suspicion, of course, but to memory. Without any apparent reason, he was back in Berlin, tramping the country roads, and beside him—

“Wonderful night!”

“Great,” he replied. “The mind’s a curious thing, isn’t it. In the instant since Miss Page went through that window I’ve been to Berlin and back! Will you have a cigarette?”

“Thanks; I have my pipe here.”

K. struck a match with his steady hands. Now that the thing had come, he was glad to face it. In the flare, his quiet profile glowed against the night. Then he flung the match over the rail.

“Perhaps my voice took you back to Berlin.”

Max stared; then he rose. Blackness had descended on them again, except for the dull glow of K.‘s old pipe.

“For God’s sake!”

“Sh! The neighbors next door have a bad habit of sitting just inside the curtains.”

“But—you!”

“Sit down. Sidney will be back in a moment. I’ll talk to you, if you’ll sit still. Can you hear me plainly?”

After a moment—“Yes.”

“I’ve been here—in the city, I mean—for a year. Name’s Le Moyne. Don’t forget it—Le Moyne. I’ve got a position in the gas office, clerical. I get fifteen dollars a week. I have reason to think I’m going to be moved up. That will be twenty, maybe twenty-two.”

Wilson stirred, but he found no adequate words. Only a part of what K. said got to him. For a moment he was back in a famous clinic, and this man across from him—it was not believable!

“It’s not hard work, and it’s safe. If I make a mistake there’s no life hanging on it. Once I made a blunder, a month or two ago. It was a big one. It cost me three dollars out of my own pocket. But—that’s all it cost.”

Wilson’s voice showed that he was more than incredulous; he was profoundly moved.

“We thought you were dead. There were all sorts of stories. When a year went by—the Titanic had gone down, and nobody knew but what you were on it—we gave up. I—in June we put up a tablet for you at the college. I went down for the—for the services.”

“Let it stay,” said K. quietly. “I’m dead as far as the college goes, anyhow. I’ll never go back. I’m Le Moyne now. And, for Heaven’s sake, don’t be sorry for me. I’m more contented than I’ve been for a long time.”

The wonder in Wilson’s voice was giving way to irritation.

“But—when you had everything! Why, good Heavens, man, I did your operation to-day, and I’ve been blowing about it ever since.”

“I had everything for a while. Then I lost the essential. When that happened I gave up. All a man in our profession has is a certain method, knowledge—call it what you like,—and faith in himself. I lost my self-confidence; that’s all. Certain things happened; kept on happening. So I gave it up. That’s all. It’s not dramatic. For about a year I was damned sorry for myself. I’ve stopped whining now.”

“If every surgeon gave up because he lost cases—I’ve just told you I did your operation to-day. There was just a chance for the man, and I took my courage in my hands and tried it. The poor devil’s dead.”

K. rose rather wearily and emptied his pipe over the balcony rail.

“That’s not the same. That’s the chance he and you took. What happened to me was—different.”

Pipe in hand, he stood staring out at the ailanthus tree with its crown of stars. Instead of the Street with its quiet houses, he saw the men he had known and worked with and taught, his friends who spoke his language, who had loved him, many of them, gathered about a bronze tablet set in a wall of the old college; he saw their earnest faces and grave eyes. He heard—

He heard the soft rustle of Sidney’s dress as she came into the little room behind them.

CHAPTER XIII

A few days after Wilson’s recognition of K., two most exciting things happened to Sidney. One was that Christine asked her to be maid of honor at her wedding. The other was more wonderful. She was accepted, and given her cap.

Because she could not get home that night, and because the little house had no telephone, she wrote the news to her mother and sent a note to Le Moyne:

DEAR K.,—I am accepted, and IT is on my head at this minute. I am as conscious of it as if it were a halo, and as if I had done something to deserve it, instead of just hoping that someday I shall. I am writing this on the bureau, so that when I lift my eyes I may see It. I am afraid just now I am thinking more of the cap than of what it means. It IS becoming!

Very soon I shall slip down and show it to the ward. I have promised. I shall go to the door when the night nurse is busy somewhere, and turn all around and let them see it, without saying a word. They love a little excitement like that.

You have been very good to me, dear K. It is you who have made possible this happiness of mine tonight. I am promising myself to be very good, and not so vain, and to love my enemies—, although I have none now. Miss Harrison has just congratulated me most kindly, and I am sure poor Joe has both forgiven and forgotten.

Off to my first lecture!

SIDNEY.

K. found the note on the hall table when he got home that night, and carried it upstairs to read. Whatever faint hope he might have had that her youth would prevent her acceptance he knew now was over. With the letter in his hand, he sat by his table and looked ahead into the empty years. Not quite empty, of course. She would be coming home.

But more and more the life of the hospital would engross her. He surmised, too, very shrewdly, that, had he ever had a hope that she might come to care for him, his very presence in the little house militated against him. There was none of the illusion of separation; he was always there, like Katie. When she opened the door, she called “Mother” from the hall. If Anna did not answer, she called him, in much the same voice.

He had built a wall of philosophy that had withstood even Wilson’s recognition and protest. But enduring philosophy comes only with time; and he was young. Now and then all his defenses crumbled before a passion that, when he dared to face it, shook him by its very strength. And that day all his stoicism went down before Sidney’s letter. Its very frankness and affection hurt—not that he did not want her affection; but he craved so much more. He threw himself face down on the bed, with the paper crushed in his hand.

Sidney’s letter was not the only one he received that day. When, in response to Katie’s summons, he rose heavily and prepared for dinner, he found an unopened envelope on the table. It was from Max Wilson:—

DEAR LE MOYNE,—I have been going around in a sort of haze all day. The fact that I only heard your voice and scarcely saw you last night has made the whole thing even more unreal.

I have a feeling of delicacy about trying to see you again so soon. I’m bound to respect your seclusion. But there are some things that have got to be discussed.

You said last night that things were “different” with you. I know about that. You’d had one or two unlucky accidents. Do you know any man in our profession who has not? And, for fear you think I do not know what I am talking about, the thing was threshed out at the State Society when the question of the tablet came up. Old Barnes got up and said: “Gentlemen, all of us live more or less in glass houses. Let him who is without guilt among us throw the first stone!” By George! You should have heard them!

I didn’t sleep last night. I took my little car and drove around the country roads, and the farther I went the more outrageous your position became. I’m not going to write any rot about the world needing men like you, although it’s true enough. But our profession does. You working in a gas office, while old O’Hara bungles and hacks, and I struggle along on what I learned from you!

It takes courage to step down from the pinnacle you stood on. So it’s not cowardice that has set you down here. It’s wrong conception. And I’ve thought of two things. The first, and best, is for you to go back. No one has taken your place, because no one could do the work. But if that’s out of the question,—and only you know that, for only you know the facts,—the next best thing is this, and in all humility I make the suggestion.

Take the State exams under your present name, and when you’ve got your certificate, come in with me. This isn’t magnanimity. I’ll be getting a damn sight more than I give.

Think it over, old man.

M.W.

It is a curious fact that a man who is absolutely untrustworthy about women is often the soul of honor to other men. The younger Wilson, taking his pleasures lightly and not too discriminatingly, was making an offer that meant his ultimate eclipse, and doing it cheerfully, with his eyes open.

K. was moved. It was like Max to make such an offer, like him to make it as if he were asking a favor and not conferring one. But the offer left him untempted. He had weighed himself in the balance, and found himself wanting. No tablet on the college wall could change that. And when, late that night, Wilson found him on the balcony and added appeal to argument, the situation remained unchanged. He realized its hopelessness when K. lapsed into whimsical humor.