K

“I’m not absolutely useless where I am, you know, Max,” he said. “I’ve raised three tomato plants and a family of kittens this summer, helped to plan a trousseau, assisted in selecting wallpaper for the room just inside,—did you notice it?—and developed a boy pitcher with a ball that twists around the bat like a Colles fracture around a splint!”

“If you’re going to be humorous—”

“My dear fellow,” said K. quietly, “if I had no sense of humor, I should go upstairs tonight, turn on the gas, and make a stertorous entrance into eternity. By the way, that’s something I forgot!”

“Eternity?” “No. Among my other activities, I wired the parlor for electric light. The bride-to-be expects some electroliers as wedding gifts, and—”

Wilson rose and flung his cigarette into the grass.

“I wish to God I understood you!” he said irritably.

K. rose with him, and all the suppressed feeling of the interview was crowded into his last few words.

“I’m not as ungrateful as you think, Max,” he said. “I—you’ve helped a lot. Don’t worry about me. I’m as well off as I deserve to be, and better. Good-night.”

“Good-night.”

Wilson’s unexpected magnanimity put K. in a curious position—left him, as it were, with a divided allegiance. Sidney’s frank infatuation for the young surgeon was growing. He was quick to see it. And where before he might have felt justified in going to the length of warning her, now his hands were tied.

Max was interested in her. K. could see that, too. More than once he had taken Sidney back to the hospital in his car. Le Moyne, handicapped at every turn, found himself facing two alternatives, one but little better than the other. The affair might run a legitimate course, ending in marriage—a year of happiness for her, and then what marriage with Max, as he knew him, would inevitably mean: wanderings away, remorseful returns to her, infidelities, misery. Or, it might be less serious but almost equally unhappy for her. Max might throw caution to the winds, pursue her for a time,—K. had seen him do this,—and then, growing tired, change to some new attraction. In either case, he could only wait and watch, eating his heart out during the long evenings when Anna read her “Daily Thoughts” upstairs and he sat alone with his pipe on the balcony.

Sidney went on night duty shortly after her acceptance. All of her orderly young life had been divided into two parts: day, when one played or worked, and night, when one slept. Now she was compelled to a readjustment: one worked in the night and slept in the day. Things seemed unnatural, chaotic. At the end of her first night report Sidney added what she could remember of a little verse of Stevenson’s. She added it to the end of her general report, which was to the effect that everything had been quiet during the night except the neighborhood.

“And does it not seem hard to you, When all the sky is clear and blue, And I should like so much to play, To have to go to bed by day?”

The day assistant happened on the report, and was quite scandalized.

“If the night nurses are to spend their time making up poetry,” she said crossly, “we’d better change this hospital into a young ladies’ seminary. If she wants to complain about the noise in the street, she should do so in proper form.”

“I don’t think she made it up,” said the Head, trying not to smile. “I’ve heard something like it somewhere, and, what with the heat and the noise of traffic, I don’t see how any of them get any sleep.”

But, because discipline must be observed, she wrote on the slip the assistant carried around: “Please submit night reports in prose.”

Sidney did not sleep much. She tumbled into her low bed at nine o’clock in the morning, those days, with her splendid hair neatly braided down her back and her prayers said, and immediately her active young mind filled with images—Christine’s wedding, Dr. Max passing the door of her old ward and she not there, Joe—even Tillie, whose story was now the sensation of the Street. A few months before she would not have cared to think of Tillie. She would have retired her into the land of things-one-must-forget. But the Street’s conventions were not holding Sidney’s thoughts now. She puzzled over Tillie a great deal, and over Grace and her kind.

On her first night on duty, a girl had been brought in from the Avenue. She had taken a poison—nobody knew just what. When the internes had tried to find out, she had only said: “What’s the use?”

And she had died.

Sidney kept asking herself, “Why?” those mornings when she could not get to sleep. People were kind—men were kind, really,—and yet, for some reason or other, those things had to be. Why?

After a time Sidney would doze fitfully. But by three o’clock she was always up and dressing. After a time the strain told on her. Lack of sleep wrote hollows around her eyes and killed some of her bright color. Between three and four o’clock in the morning she was overwhelmed on duty by a perfect madness of sleep. There was a penalty for sleeping on duty. The old night watchman had a way of slipping up on one nodding. The night nurses wished they might fasten a bell on him!

Luckily, at four came early-morning temperatures; that roused her. And after that came the clatter of early milk-wagons and the rose hues of dawn over the roofs. Twice in the night, once at supper and again toward dawn, she drank strong black coffee. But after a week or two her nerves were stretched taut as a string.

Her station was in a small room close to her three wards. But she sat very little, as a matter of fact. Her responsibility was heavy on her; she made frequent rounds. The late summer nights were fitful, feverish; the darkened wards stretched away like caverns from the dim light near the door. And from out of these caverns came petulant voices, uneasy movements, the banging of a cup on a bedside, which was the signal of thirst.

The older nurses saved themselves when they could. To them, perhaps just a little weary with time and much service, the banging cup meant not so much thirst as annoyance. They visited Sidney sometimes and cautioned her.

“Don’t jump like that, child; they’re not parched, you know.”

“But if you have a fever and are thirsty—”

“Thirsty nothing! They get lonely. All they want is to see somebody.”

“Then,” Sidney would say, rising resolutely, “they are going to see me.”

Gradually the older girls saw that she would not save herself. They liked her very much, and they, too, had started in with willing feet and tender hands; but the thousand and one demands of their service had drained them dry. They were efficient, cool-headed, quick-thinking machines, doing their best, of course, but differing from Sidney in that their service was of the mind, while hers was of the heart. To them, pain was a thing to be recorded on a report; to Sidney, it was written on the tablets of her soul.

Carlotta Harrison went on night duty at the same time—her last night service, as it was Sidney’s first. She accepted it stoically. She had charge of the three wards on the floor just below Sidney, and of the ward into which all emergency cases were taken. It was a difficult service, perhaps the most difficult in the house. Scarcely a night went by without its patrol or ambulance case. Ordinarily, the emergency ward had its own night nurse. But the house was full to overflowing. Belated vacations and illness had depleted the training-school. Carlotta, given double duty, merely shrugged her shoulders.

“I’ve always had things pretty hard here,” she commented briefly. “When I go out, I’ll either be competent enough to run a whole hospital singlehanded, or I’ll be carried out feet first.”

Sidney was glad to have her so near. She knew her better than she knew the other nurses. Small emergencies were constantly arising and finding her at a loss. Once at least every night, Miss Harrison would hear a soft hiss from the back staircase that connected the two floors, and, going out, would see Sidney’s flushed face and slightly crooked cap bending over the stair-rail.

“I’m dreadfully sorry to bother you,” she would say, “but So-and-So won’t have a fever bath”; or, “I’ve a woman here who refuses her medicine.” Then would follow rapid questions and equally rapid answers. Much as Carlotta disliked and feared the girl overhead, it never occurred to her to refuse her assistance. Perhaps the angels who keep the great record will put that to her credit.

Sidney saw her first death shortly after she went on night duty. It was the most terrible experience of all her life; and yet, as death goes, it was quiet enough. So gradual was it that Sidney, with K.‘s little watch in hand, was not sure exactly when it happened. The light was very dim behind the little screen. One moment the sheet was quivering slightly under the struggle for breath, the next it was still. That was all. But to the girl it was catastrophe. That life, so potential, so tremendous a thing, could end so ignominiously, that the long battle should terminate always in this capitulation—it seemed to her that she could not stand it. Added to all her other new problems of living was this one of dying.

She made mistakes, of course, which the kindly nurses forgot to report—basins left about, errors on her records. She rinsed her thermometer in hot water one night, and startled an interne by sending him word that Mary McGuire’s temperature was a hundred and ten degrees. She let a delirious patient escape from the ward another night and go airily down the fire-escape before she discovered what had happened! Then she distinguished herself by flying down the iron staircase and bringing the runaway back singlehanded.

For Christine’s wedding the Street threw off its drab attire and assumed a wedding garment. In the beginning it was incredulous about some of the details.

“An awning from the house door to the curbstone, and a policeman!” reported Mrs. Rosenfeld, who was finding steady employment at the Lorenz house. “And another awning at the church, with a red carpet!”

Mr. Rosenfeld had arrived home and was making up arrears of rest and recreation.

“Huh!” he said. “Suppose it don’t rain. What then?” His Jewish father spoke in him.

“And another policeman at the church!” said Mrs. Rosenfeld triumphantly.

“Why do they ask ‘em if they don’t trust ‘em?”

But the mention of the policemen had been unfortunate. It recalled to him many things that were better forgotten. He rose and scowled at his wife.

“You tell Johnny something for me,” he snarled. “You tell him when he sees his father walking down street, and he sittin’ up there alone on that automobile, I want him to stop and pick me up when I hail him. Me walking, while my son swells around in a car! And another thing.” He turned savagely at the door. “You let me hear of him road-housin’, and I’ll kill him!”

The wedding was to be at five o’clock. This, in itself, defied all traditions of the Street, which was either married in the very early morning at the Catholic church or at eight o’clock in the evening at the Presbyterian. There was something reckless about five o’clock. The Street felt the dash of it. It had a queer feeling that perhaps such a marriage was not quite legal.

The question of what to wear became, for the men, an earnest one. Dr. Ed resurrected an old black frock-coat and had a “V” of black cambric set in the vest. Mr. Jenkins, the grocer, rented a cutaway, and bought a new Panama to wear with it. The deaf-and-dumb book agent who boarded at McKees’, and who, by reason of his affliction, was calmly ignorant of the excitement around him, wore a borrowed dress-suit, and considered himself to the end of his days the only properly attired man in the church.

The younger Wilson was to be one of the ushers. When the newspapers came out with the published list and this was discovered, as well as that Sidney was the maid of honor, there was a distinct quiver through the hospital training-school. A probationer was authorized to find out particulars. It was the day of the wedding then, and Sidney, who had not been to bed at all, was sitting in a sunny window in the Dormitory Annex, drying her hair.

The probationer was distinctly uneasy.

“I—I just wonder,” she said, “if you would let some of the girls come in to see you when you’re dressed?”

“Why, of course I will.”

“It’s awfully thrilling, isn’t it? And—isn’t Dr. Wilson going to be an usher?”

Sidney colored. “I believe so.”

“Are you going to walk down the aisle with him?”

“I don’t know. They had a rehearsal last night, but of course I was not there. I—I think I walk alone.”

The probationer had been instructed to find out other things; so she set to work with a fan at Sidney’s hair.

“You’ve known Dr. Wilson a long time, haven’t you?”

“Ages.”

“He’s awfully good-looking, isn’t he?”

Sidney considered. She was not ignorant of the methods of the school. If this girl was pumping her—

“I’ll have to think that over,” she said, with a glint of mischief in her eyes. “When you know a person terribly well, you hardly know whether he’s good-looking or not.”

“I suppose,” said the probationer, running the long strands of Sidney’s hair through her fingers, “that when you are at home you see him often.”

Sidney got off the windowsill, and, taking the probationer smilingly by the shoulders, faced her toward the door.

“You go back to the girls,” she said, “and tell them to come in and see me when I am dressed, and tell them this: I don’t know whether I am to walk down the aisle with Dr. Wilson, but I hope I am. I see him very often. I like him very much. I hope he likes me. And I think he’s handsome.”

She shoved the probationer out into the hall and locked the door behind her.

That message in its entirety reached Carlotta Harrison. Her smouldering eyes flamed. The audacity of it startled her. Sidney must be very sure of herself.

She, too, had not slept during the day. When the probationer who had brought her the report had gone out, she lay in her long white nightgown, hands clasped under her head, and stared at the vault-like ceiling of her little room.

She saw there Sidney in her white dress going down the aisle of the church; she saw the group around the altar; and, as surely as she lay there, she knew that Max Wilson’s eyes would be, not on the bride, but on the girl who stood beside her.

The curious thing was that Carlotta felt that she could stop the wedding if she wanted to. She’d happened on a bit of information—many a wedding had been stopped for less. It rather obsessed her to think of stopping the wedding, so that Sidney and Max would not walk down the aisle together.

There came, at last, an hour before the wedding, a lull in the feverish activities of the previous month. Everything was ready. In the Lorenz kitchen, piles of plates, negro waiters, ice-cream freezers, and Mrs. Rosenfeld stood in orderly array. In the attic, in the center of a sheet, before a toilet-table which had been carried upstairs for her benefit, sat, on this her day of days, the bride. All the second story had been prepared for guests and presents.

Florists were still busy in the room below. Bridesmaids were clustered on the little staircase, bending over at each new ring of the bell and calling reports to Christine through the closed door:—

“Another wooden box, Christine. It looks like more plates. What will you ever do with them all?”

“Good Heavens! Here’s another of the neighbors who wants to see how you look. Do say you can’t have any visitors now.”

Christine sat alone in the center of her sheet. The bridesmaids had been sternly forbidden to come into her room.

“I haven’t had a chance to think for a month,” she said. “And I’ve got some things I’ve got to think out.”

But, when Sidney came, she sent for her. Sidney found her sitting on a stiff chair, in her wedding gown, with her veil spread out on a small stand.

“Close the door,” said Christine. And, after Sidney had kissed her:—

“I’ve a good mind not to do it.”

“You’re tired and nervous, that’s all.”

“I am, of course. But that isn’t what’s wrong with me. Throw that veil some place and sit down.”

Christine was undoubtedly rouged, a very delicate touch. Sidney thought brides should be rather pale. But under her eyes were lines that Sidney had never seen there before.

“I’m not going to be foolish, Sidney. I’ll go through with it, of course. It would put mamma in her grave if I made a scene now.”

She suddenly turned on Sidney.

“Palmer gave his bachelor dinner at the Country Club last night. They all drank more than they should. Somebody called father up to-day and said that Palmer had emptied a bottle of wine into the piano. He hasn’t been here to-day.”

“He’ll be along. And as for the other—perhaps it wasn’t Palmer who did it.”

“That’s not it, Sidney. I’m frightened.”

Three months before, perhaps, Sidney could not have comforted her; but three months had made a change in Sidney. The complacent sophistries of her girlhood no longer answered for truth. She put her arms around Christine’s shoulders.

“A man who drinks is a broken reed,” said Christine. “That’s what I’m going to marry and lean on the rest of my life—a broken reed. And that isn’t all!”

She got up quickly, and, trailing her long satin train across the floor, bolted the door. Then from inside her corsage she brought out and held to Sidney a letter. “Special delivery. Read it.”

It was very short; Sidney read it at a glance:—

Ask your future husband if he knows a girl at 213 –- Avenue.

Three months before, the Avenue would have meant nothing to Sidney. Now she knew. Christine, more sophisticated, had always known.

“You see,” she said. “That’s what I’m up against.”

Quite suddenly Sidney knew who the girl at 213 –- Avenue was. The paper she held in her hand was hospital paper with the heading torn off. The whole sordid story lay before her: Grace Irving, with her thin face and cropped hair, and the newspaper on the floor of the ward beside her!

One of the bridesmaids thumped violently on the door outside.

“Another electric lamp,” she called excitedly through the door. “And Palmer is downstairs.”

“You see,” Christine said drearily. “I have received another electric lamp, and Palmer is downstairs! I’ve got to go through with it, I suppose. The only difference between me and other brides is that I know what I’m getting. Most of them do not.”

“You’re going on with it?”

“It’s too late to do anything else. I am not going to give this neighborhood anything to talk about.”

She picked up her veil and set the coronet on her head. Sidney stood with the letter in her hands. One of K.‘s answers to her hot question had been this:—

“There is no sense in looking back unless it helps us to look ahead. What your little girl of the ward has been is not so important as what she is going to be.”

“Even granting this to be true,” she said to Christine slowly,—“and it may only be malicious after all, Christine,—it’s surely over and done with. It’s not Palmer’s past that concerns you now; it’s his future with you, isn’t it?”

Christine had finally adjusted her veil. A band of duchesse lace rose like a coronet from her soft hair, and from it, sweeping to the end of her train, fell fold after fold of soft tulle. She arranged the coronet carefully with small pearl-topped pins. Then she rose and put her hands on Sidney’s shoulders.

“The simple truth is,” she said quietly, “that I might hold Palmer if I cared—terribly. I don’t. And I’m afraid he knows it. It’s my pride that’s hurt, nothing else.”

And thus did Christine Lorenz go down to her wedding.

Sidney stood for a moment, her eyes on the letter she held. Already, in her new philosophy, she had learned many strange things. One of them was this: that women like Grace Irving did not betray their lovers; that the code of the underworld was “death to the squealer”; that one played the game, and won or lost, and if he lost, took his medicine. If not Grace, then who? Somebody else in the hospital who knew her story, of course. But who? And again—why?

Before going downstairs, Sidney placed the letter in a saucer and set fire to it with a match. Some of the radiance had died out of her eyes.

The Street voted the wedding a great success. The alley, however, was rather confused by certain things. For instance, it regarded the awning as essentially for the carriage guests, and showed a tendency to duck in under the side when no one was looking. Mrs. Rosenfeld absolutely refused to take the usher’s arm which was offered her, and said she guessed she was able to walk up alone.

Johnny Rosenfeld came, as befitted his position, in a complete chauffeur’s outfit of leather cap and leggings, with the shield that was his State license pinned over his heart.

The Street came decorously, albeit with a degree of uncertainty as to supper. Should they put something on the stove before they left, in case only ice cream and cake were served at the house? Or was it just as well to trust to luck, and, if the Lorenz supper proved inadequate, to sit down to a cold snack when they got home?

To K., sitting in the back of the church between Harriet and Anna, the wedding was Sidney—Sidney only. He watched her first steps down the aisle, saw her chin go up as she gained poise and confidence, watched the swinging of her young figure in its gauzy white as she passed him and went forward past the long rows of craning necks. Afterward he could not remember the wedding party at all. The service for him was Sidney, rather awed and very serious, beside the altar. It was Sidney who came down the aisle to the triumphant strains of the wedding march, Sidney with Max beside her!

On his right sat Harriet, having reached the first pinnacle of her new career. The wedding gowns were successful. They were more than that—they were triumphant. Sitting there, she cast comprehensive eyes over the church, filled with potential brides.

To Harriet, then, that October afternoon was a future of endless lace and chiffon, the joy of creation, triumph eclipsing triumph. But to Anna, watching the ceremony with blurred eyes and ineffectual bluish lips, was coming her hour. Sitting back in the pew, with her hands folded over her prayer-book, she said a little prayer for her straight young daughter, facing out from the altar with clear, unafraid eyes.

As Sidney and Max drew near the door, Joe Drummond, who had been standing at the back of the church, turned quickly and went out. He stumbled, rather, as if he could not see.

CHAPTER XIV

The supper at the White Springs Hotel had not been the last supper Carlotta Harrison and Max Wilson had taken together. Carlotta had selected for her vacation a small town within easy motoring distance of the city, and two or three times during her two weeks off duty Wilson had gone out to see her. He liked being with her. She stimulated him. For once that he could see Sidney, he saw Carlotta twice.

She had kept the affair well in hand. She was playing for high stakes. She knew quite well the kind of man with whom she was dealing—that he would pay as little as possible. But she knew, too, that, let him want a thing enough, he would pay any price for it, even marriage.

She was very skillful. The very ardor in her face was in her favor. Behind her hot eyes lurked cold calculation. She would put the thing through, and show those puling nurses, with their pious eyes and evening prayers, a thing or two.

During that entire vacation he never saw her in anything more elaborate than the simplest of white dresses modestly open at the throat, sleeves rolled up to show her satiny arms. There were no other boarders at the little farmhouse. She sat for hours in the summer evenings in the square yard filled with apple trees that bordered the highway, carefully posed over a book, but with her keen eyes always on the road. She read Browning, Emerson, Swinburne. Once he found her with a book that she hastily concealed. He insisted on seeing it, and secured it. It was a book on brain surgery. Confronted with it, she blushed and dropped her eyes.

His delighted vanity found in it the most insidious of compliments, as she had intended.

“I feel such an idiot when I am with you,” she said. “I wanted to know a little more about the things you do.”

That put their relationship on a new and advanced basis. Thereafter he occasionally talked surgery instead of sentiment. He found her responsive, intelligent. His work, a sealed book to his women before, lay open to her.

Now and then their professional discussions ended in something different. The two lines of their interest converged.

“Gad!” he said one day. “I look forward to these evenings. I can talk shop with you without either shocking or nauseating you. You are the most intelligent woman I know—and one of the prettiest.”

He had stopped the machine on the crest of a hill for the ostensible purpose of admiring the view.

“As long as you talk shop,” she said, “I feel that there is nothing wrong in our being together; but when you say the other thing—”

“Is it wrong to tell a pretty woman you admire her?”

“Under our circumstances, yes.”

He twisted himself around in the seat and sat looking at her.

“The loveliest mouth in the world!” he said, and kissed her suddenly.

She had expected it for at least a week, but her surprise was well done. Well done also was her silence during the homeward ride.

No, she was not angry, she said. It was only that he had set her thinking. When she got out of the car, she bade him good-night and good-bye. He only laughed.

“Don’t you trust me?” he said, leaning out to her.

She raised her dark eyes.

“It is not that. I do not trust myself.”

After that nothing could have kept him away, and she knew it.

“Man demands both danger and play; therefore he selects woman as the most dangerous of toys.” A spice of danger had entered into their relationship. It had become infinitely piquant.

He motored out to the farm the next day, to be told that Miss Harrison had gone for a long walk and had not said when she would be back. That pleased him. Evidently she was frightened. Every man likes to think that he is a bit of a devil. Dr. Max settled his tie, and, leaving his car outside the whitewashed fence, departed blithely on foot in the direction Carlotta had taken.

She knew her man, of course. He found her, face down, under a tree, looking pale and worn and bearing all the evidence of a severe mental struggle. She rose in confusion when she heard his step, and retreated a foot or two, with her hands out before her.

“How dare you?” she cried. “How dare you follow me! I—I have got to have a little time alone. I have got to think things out.”

He knew it was play-acting, but rather liked it; and, because he was quite as skillful as she was, he struck a match on the trunk of the tree and lighted a cigarette before he answered.

“I was afraid of this,” he said, playing up. “You take it entirely too hard. I am not really a villain, Carlotta.”

It was the first time he had used her name.

“Sit down and let us talk things over.”

She sat down at a safe distance, and looked across the little clearing to him with the somber eyes that were her great asset.

“You can afford to be very calm,” she said, “because this is only play to you; I know it. I’ve known it all along. I’m a good listener and not—unattractive. But what is play for you is not necessarily play for me. I am going away from here.”

For the first time, he found himself believing in her sincerity. Why, the girl was white. He didn’t want to hurt her. If she cried—he was at the mercy of any woman who cried.

“Give up your training?”

“What else can I do? This sort of thing cannot go on, Dr. Max.”

She did cry then—real tears; and he went over beside her and took her in his arms.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “Please don’t do that. You make me feel like a scoundrel, and I’ve only been taking a little bit of happiness. That’s all. I swear it.”

She lifted her head from his shoulder.

“You mean you are happy with me?”

“Very, very happy,” said Dr. Max, and kissed her again on the lips.

The one element Carlotta had left out of her calculations was herself. She had known the man, had taken the situation at its proper value. But she had left out this important factor in the equation,—that factor which in every relationship between man and woman determines the equation,—the woman.

Into her calculating ambition had come a new and destroying element. She who, like K. in his little room on the Street, had put aside love and the things thereof, found that it would not be put aside. By the end of her short vacation Carlotta Harrison was wildly in love with the younger Wilson.

They continued to meet, not as often as before, but once a week, perhaps. The meetings were full of danger now; and if for the girl they lost by this quality, they gained attraction for the man. She was shrewd enough to realize her own situation. The thing had gone wrong. She cared, and he did not. It was all a game now, not hers.

All women are intuitive; women in love are dangerously so. As well as she knew that his passion for her was not the real thing, so also she realized that there was growing up in his heart something akin to the real thing for Sidney Page. Suspicion became certainty after a talk they had over the supper table at a country roadhouse the day after Christine’s wedding.

“How was the wedding—tiresome?” she asked.

“Thrilling! There’s always something thrilling to me in a man tying himself up for life to one woman. It’s—it’s so reckless.”

Her eyes narrowed. “That’s not exactly the Law and the Prophets, is it?”

“It’s the truth. To think of selecting out of all the world one woman, and electing to spend the rest of one’s days with her! Although—”

His eyes looked past Carlotta into distance.

“Sidney Page was one of the bridesmaids,” he said irrelevantly. “She was lovelier than the bride.”

“Pretty, but stupid,” said Carlotta. “I like her. I’ve really tried to teach her things, but—you know—” She shrugged her shoulders.

Dr. Max was learning wisdom. If there was a twinkle in his eye, he veiled it discreetly. But, once again in the machine, he bent over and put his cheek against hers.

“You little cat! You’re jealous,” he said exultantly.

Nevertheless, although he might smile, the image of Sidney lay very close to his heart those autumn days. And Carlotta knew it.

Sidney came off night duty the middle of November. The night duty had been a time of comparative peace to Carlotta. There were no evenings when Dr. Max could bring Sidney back to the hospital in his car.

Sidney’s half-days at home were occasions for agonies of jealousy on Carlotta’s part. On such an occasion, a month after the wedding, she could not contain herself. She pleaded her old excuse of headache, and took the trolley to a point near the end of the Street. After twilight fell, she slowly walked the length of the Street. Christine and Palmer had not returned from their wedding journey. The November evening was not cold, and on the little balcony sat Sidney and Dr. Max. K. was there, too, had she only known it, sitting back in the shadow and saying little, his steady eyes on Sidney’s profile.

But this Carlotta did not know. She went on down the Street in a frenzy of jealous anger.

After that two ideas ran concurrent in Carlotta’s mind: one was to get Sidney out of the way, the other was to make Wilson propose to her. In her heart she knew that on the first depended the second.

A week later she made the same frantic excursion, but with a different result. Sidney was not in sight, or Wilson. But standing on the wooden doorstep of the little house was Le Moyne. The ailanthus trees were bare at that time, throwing gaunt arms upward to the November sky. The street-lamp, which in the summer left the doorstep in the shadow, now shone through the branches and threw into strong relief Le Moyne’s tall figure and set face. Carlotta saw him too late to retreat. But he did not see her. She went on, startled, her busy brain scheming anew. Another element had entered into her plotting. It was the first time she had known that K. lived in the Page house. It gave her a sense of uncertainty and deadly fear.

She made her first friendly overture of many days to Sidney the following day. They met in the locker-room in the basement where the street clothing for the ward patients was kept. Here, rolled in bundles and ticketed, side by side lay the heterogeneous garments in which the patients had met accident or illness. Rags and tidiness, filth and cleanliness, lay almost touching.

Far away on the other side of the whitewashed basement, men were unloading gleaming cans of milk. Floods of sunlight came down the cellar-way, touching their white coats and turning the cans to silver. Everywhere was the religion of the hospital, which is order.

Sidney, harking back from recent slights to the staircase conversation of her night duty, smiled at Carlotta cheerfully.

“A miracle is happening,” she said. “Grace Irving is going out to-day. When one remembers how ill she was and how we thought she could not live, it’s rather a triumph, isn’t it?”

“Are those her clothes?”

Sidney examined with some dismay the elaborate negligee garments in her hand.

“She can’t go out in those; I shall have to lend her something.” A little of the light died out of her face. “She’s had a hard fight, and she has won,” she said. “But when I think of what she’s probably going back to—”

Carlotta shrugged her shoulders.

“It’s all in the day’s work,” she observed indifferently. “You can take them up into the kitchen and give them steady work paring potatoes, or put them in the laundry ironing. In the end it’s the same thing. They all go back.”

She drew a package from the locker and looked at it ruefully.

“Well, what do you know about this? Here’s a woman who came in in a nightgown and pair of slippers. And now she wants to go out in half an hour!”

She turned, on her way out of the locker-room, and shot a quick glance at Sidney.

“I happened to be on your street the other night,” she said. “You live across the street from Wilsons’, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so; I had heard you speak of the house. Your—your brother was standing on the steps.”

Sidney laughed.

“I have no brother. That’s a roomer, a Mr. Le Moyne. It isn’t really right to call him a roomer; he’s one of the family now.”

“Le Moyne!”

He had even taken another name. It had hit him hard, for sure.

K.‘s name had struck an always responsive chord in Sidney. The two girls went toward the elevator together. With a very little encouragement, Sidney talked of K. She was pleased at Miss Harrison’s friendly tone, glad that things were all right between them again. At her floor, she put a timid hand on the girl’s arm.

“I was afraid I had offended you or displeased you,” she said. “I’m so glad it isn’t so.”

Carlotta shivered under her hand.

Things were not going any too well with K. True, he had received his promotion at the office, and with this present affluence of twenty-two dollars a week he was able to do several things. Mrs. Rosenfeld now washed and ironed one day a week at the little house, so that Katie might have more time to look after Anna. He had increased also the amount of money that he periodically sent East.

So far, well enough. The thing that rankled and filled him with a sense of failure was Max Wilson’s attitude. It was not unfriendly; it was, indeed, consistently respectful, almost reverential. But he clearly considered Le Moyne’s position absurd.

There was no true comradeship between the two men; but there was beginning to be constant association, and lately a certain amount of friction. They thought differently about almost everything.

Wilson began to bring all his problems to Le Moyne. There were long consultations in that small upper room. Perhaps more than one man or woman who did not know of K.‘s existence owed his life to him that fall.

Under K.‘s direction, Max did marvels. Cases began to come in to him from the surrounding towns. To his own daring was added a new and remarkable technique. But Le Moyne, who had found resignation if not content, was once again in touch with the work he loved. There were times when, having thrashed a case out together and outlined the next day’s work for Max, he would walk for hours into the night out over the hills, fighting his battle. The longing was on him to be in the thick of things again. The thought of the gas office and its deadly round sickened him.

It was on one of his long walks that K. found Tillie.

It was December then, gray and raw, with a wet snow that changed to rain as it fell. The country roads were ankle-deep with mud, the wayside paths thick with sodden leaves. The dreariness of the countryside that Saturday afternoon suited his mood. He had ridden to the end of the street-car line, and started his walk from there. As was his custom, he wore no overcoat, but a short sweater under his coat. Somewhere along the road he had picked up a mongrel dog, and, as if in sheer desire for human society, it trotted companionably at his heels.

Seven miles from the end of the car line he found a roadhouse, and stopped in for a glass of Scotch. He was chilled through. The dog went in with him, and stood looking up into his face. It was as if he submitted, but wondered why this indoors, with the scents of the road ahead and the trails of rabbits over the fields.

The house was set in a valley at the foot of two hills. Through the mist of the December afternoon, it had loomed pleasantly before him. The door was ajar, and he stepped into a little hall covered with ingrain carpet. To the right was the dining-room, the table covered with a white cloth, and in its exact center an uncompromising bunch of dried flowers. To the left, the typical parlor of such places. It might have been the parlor of the White Springs Hotel in duplicate, plush self-rocker and all. Over everything was silence and a pervading smell of fresh varnish. The house was aggressive with new paint—the sagging old floors shone with it, the doors gleamed.

“Hello!” called K.

There were slow footsteps upstairs, the closing of a bureau drawer, the rustle of a woman’s dress coming down the stairs. K., standing uncertainly on a carpet oasis that was the center of the parlor varnish, stripped off his sweater.

“Not very busy here this afternoon!” he said to the unseen female on the staircase. Then he saw her. It was Tillie. She put a hand against the doorframe to steady herself. Tillie surely, but a new Tillie! With her hair loosened around her face, a fresh blue chintz dress open at the throat, a black velvet bow on her breast, here was a Tillie fuller, infinitely more attractive, than he had remembered her. But she did not smile at him. There was something about her eyes not unlike the dog’s expression, submissive, but questioning.

“Well, you’ve found me, Mr. Le Moyne.” And, when he held out his hand, smiling: “I just had to do it, Mr. K.”

“And how’s everything going? You look mighty fine and—happy, Tillie.”

“I’m all right. Mr. Schwitter’s gone to the postoffice. He’ll be back at five. Will you have a cup of tea, or will you have something else?”

The instinct of the Street was still strong in Tillie. The Street did not approve of “something else.”

“Scotch-and-soda,” said Le Moyne. “And shall I buy a ticket for you to punch?”

But she only smiled faintly. He was sorry he had made the blunder. Evidently the Street and all that pertained was a sore subject.

So this was Tillie’s new home! It was for this that she had exchanged the virginal integrity of her life at Mrs. McKee’s—for this wind-swept little house, tidily ugly, infinitely lonely. There were two crayon enlargements over the mantel. One was Schwitter, evidently. The other was the paper-doll wife. K. wondered what curious instinct of self-abnegation had caused Tillie to leave the wife there undisturbed. Back of its position of honor he saw the girl’s realization of her own situation. On a wooden shelf, exactly between the two pictures, was another vase of dried flowers.

Tillie brought the Scotch, already mixed, in a tall glass. K. would have preferred to mix it himself, but the Scotch was good. He felt a new respect for Mr. Schwitter.

“You gave me a turn at first,” said Tillie. “But I am right glad to see you, Mr. Le Moyne. Now that the roads are bad, nobody comes very much. It’s lonely.”

Until now, K. and Tillie, when they met, had met conversationally on the common ground of food. They no longer had that, and between them both lay like a barrier their last conversation.

“Are you happy, Tillie?” said K. suddenly.

“I expected you’d ask me that. I’ve been thinking what to say.”

Her reply set him watching her face. More attractive it certainly was, but happy? There was a wistfulness about Tillie’s mouth that set him wondering.

“Is he good to you?”

“He’s about the best man on earth. He’s never said a cross word to me—even at first, when I was panicky and scared at every sound.”

Le Moyne nodded understandingly.

“I burned a lot of victuals when I first came, running off and hiding when I heard people around the place. It used to seem to me that what I’d done was written on my face. But he never said a word.”

“That’s over now?”

“I don’t run. I am still frightened.”

“Then it has been worth while?”

Tillie glanced up at the two pictures over the mantel.

“Sometimes it is—when he comes in tired, and I’ve a chicken ready or some fried ham and eggs for his supper, and I see him begin to look rested. He lights his pipe, and many an evening he helps me with the dishes. He’s happy; he’s getting fat.”

“But you?” Le Moyne persisted.

“I wouldn’t go back to where I was, but I am not happy, Mr. Le Moyne. There’s no use pretending. I want a baby. All along I’ve wanted a baby. He wants one. This place is his, and he’d like a boy to come into it when he’s gone. But, my God! if I did have one; what would it be?”

K.‘s eyes followed hers to the picture and the everlastings underneath.

“And she—there isn’t any prospect of her—?”

“No.”

There was no solution to Tillie’s problem. Le Moyne, standing on the hearth and looking down at her, realized that, after all, Tillie must work out her own salvation. He could offer her no comfort.

They talked far into the growing twilight of the afternoon. Tillie was hungry for news of the Street: must know of Christine’s wedding, of Harriet, of Sidney in her hospital. And when he had told her all, she sat silent, rolling her handkerchief in her fingers. Then:—

“Take the four of us,” she said suddenly,—“Christine Lorenz and Sidney Page and Miss Harriet and me,—and which one would you have picked to go wrong like this? I guess, from the looks of things, most folks would have thought it would be the Lorenz girl. They’d have picked Harriet Kennedy for the hospital, and me for the dressmaking, and it would have been Sidney Page that got married and had an automobile. Well, that’s life.”

She looked up at K. shrewdly.

“There were some people out here lately. They didn’t know me, and I heard them talking. They said Sidney Page was going to marry Dr. Max Wilson.”

“Possibly. I believe there is no engagement yet.”

He had finished with his glass. Tillie rose to take it away. As she stood before him she looked up into his face.

“If you like her as well as I think you do, Mr. Le Moyne, you won’t let him get her.”

“I am afraid that’s not up to me, is it? What would I do with a wife, Tillie?”

“You’d be faithful to her. That’s more than he would be. I guess, in the long run, that would count more than money.”

That was what K. took home with him after his encounter with Tillie. He pondered it on his way back to the street-car, as he struggled against the wind. The weather had changed. Wagon-tracks along the road were filled with water and had begun to freeze. The rain had turned to a driving sleet that cut his face. Halfway to the trolley line, the dog turned off into a by-road. K. did not miss him. The dog stared after him, one foot raised. Once again his eyes were like Tillie’s, as she had waved good-bye from the porch.

His head sunk on his breast, K. covered miles of road with his long, swinging pace, and fought his battle. Was Tillie right, after all, and had he been wrong? Why should he efface himself, if it meant Sidney’s unhappiness? Why not accept Wilson’s offer and start over again? Then if things went well—the temptation was strong that stormy afternoon. He put it from him at last, because of the conviction that whatever he did would make no change in Sidney’s ultimate decision. If she cared enough for Wilson, she would marry him. He felt that she cared enough.

CHAPTER XV

Palmer and Christine returned from their wedding trip the day K. discovered Tillie. Anna Page made much of the arrival, insisted on dinner for them that night at the little house, must help Christine unpack her trunks and arrange her wedding gifts about the apartment. She was brighter than she had been for days, more interested. The wonders of the trousseau filled her with admiration and a sort of jealous envy for Sidney, who could have none of these things. In a pathetic sort of way, she mothered Christine in lieu of her own daughter.

And it was her quick eye that discerned something wrong. Christine was not quite happy. Under her excitement was an undercurrent of reserve. Anna, rich in maternity if in nothing else, felt it, and in reply to some speech of Christine’s that struck her as hard, not quite fitting, she gave her a gentle admonishing.

“Married life takes a little adjusting, my dear,” she said. “After we have lived to ourselves for a number of years, it is not easy to live for some one else.”

Christine straightened from the tea-table she was arranging.

“That’s true, of course. But why should the woman do all the adjusting?”

“Men are more set,” said poor Anna, who had never been set in anything in her life. “It is harder for them to give in. And, of course, Palmer is older, and his habits—”

“The less said about Palmer’s habits the better,” flashed Christine. “I appear to have married a bunch of habits.”

She gave over her unpacking, and sat down listlessly by the fire, while Anna moved about, busy with the small activities that delighted her.

Six weeks of Palmer’s society in unlimited amounts had bored Christine to distraction. She sat with folded hands and looked into a future that seemed to include nothing but Palmer: Palmer asleep with his mouth open; Palmer shaving before breakfast, and irritable until he had had his coffee; Palmer yawning over the newspaper.

And there was a darker side to the picture than that. There was a vision of Palmer slipping quietly into his room and falling into the heavy sleep, not of drunkenness perhaps, but of drink. That had happened twice. She knew now that it would happen again and again, as long as he lived. Drinking leads to other things. The letter she had received on her wedding day was burned into her brain. There would be that in the future too, probably.

Christine was not without courage. She was making a brave clutch at happiness. But that afternoon of the first day at home she was terrified. She was glad when Anna went and left her alone by her fire.

But when she heard a step in the hall, she opened the door herself. She had determined to meet Palmer with a smile. Tears brought nothing; she had learned that already. Men liked smiling women and good cheer. “Daughters of joy,” they called girls like the one on the Avenue. So she opened the door smiling.

But it was K. in the hall. She waited while, with his back to her, he shook himself like a great dog. When he turned, she was watching him.

“You!” said Le Moyne. “Why, welcome home.”

He smiled down at her, his kindly eyes lighting.

“It’s good to be home and to see you again. Won’t you come in to my fire?”

“I’m wet.”

“All the more reason why you should come,” she cried gayly, and held the door wide.

The little parlor was cheerful with fire and soft lamps, bright with silver vases full of flowers. K. stepped inside and took a critical survey of the room.

“Well!” he said. “Between us we have made a pretty good job of this, I with the paper and the wiring, and you with your pretty furnishings and your pretty self.”

He glanced at her appreciatively. Christine saw his approval, and was happier than she had been for weeks. She put on the thousand little airs and graces that were a part of her—held her chin high, looked up at him with the little appealing glances that she had found were wasted on Palmer. She lighted the spirit-lamp to make tea, drew out the best chair for him, and patted a cushion with her well-cared-for hands.

“A big chair for a big man!” she said. “And see, here’s a footstool.”

“I am ridiculously fond of being babied,” said K., and quite basked in his new atmosphere of well-being. This was better than his empty room upstairs, than tramping along country roads, than his own thoughts.

“And now, how is everything?” asked Christine from across the fire. “Do tell me all the scandal of the Street.”

“There has been no scandal since you went away,” said K. And, because each was glad not to be left to his own thoughts, they laughed at this bit of unconscious humor.

“Seriously,” said Le Moyne, “we have been very quiet. I have had my salary raised and am now rejoicing in twenty-two dollars a week. I am still not accustomed to it. Just when I had all my ideas fixed for fifteen, I get twenty-two and have to reassemble them. I am disgustingly rich.”

“It is very disagreeable when one’s income becomes a burden,” said Christine gravely.

She was finding in Le Moyne something that she needed just then—a solidity, a sort of dependability, that had nothing to do with heaviness. She felt that here was a man she could trust, almost confide in. She liked his long hands, his shabby but well-cut clothes, his fine profile with its strong chin. She left off her little affectations,—a tribute to his own lack of them,—and sat back in her chair, watching the fire.

When K. chose, he could talk well. The Howes had been to Bermuda on their wedding trip. He knew Bermuda; that gave them a common ground. Christine relaxed under his steady voice. As for K., he frankly enjoyed the little visit—drew himself at last with regret out of his chair.

“You’ve been very nice to ask me in, Mrs. Howe,” he said. “I hope you will allow me to come again. But, of course, you are going to be very gay.”

It seemed to Christine she would never be gay again. She did not want him to go away. The sound of his deep voice gave her a sense of security. She liked the clasp of the hand he held out to her, when at last he made a move toward the door.

“Tell Mr. Howe I am sorry he missed our little party,” said Le Moyne. “And—thank you.”

“Will you come again?” asked Christine rather wistfully.

“Just as often as you ask me.”

As he closed the door behind him, there was a new light in Christine’s eyes. Things were not right, but, after all, they were not hopeless. One might still have friends, big and strong, steady of eye and voice. When Palmer came home, the smile she gave him was not forced.

The day’s exertion had been bad for Anna. Le Moyne found her on the couch in the transformed sewing-room, and gave her a quick glance of apprehension. She was propped up high with pillows, with a bottle of aromatic ammonia beside her.

“Just—short of breath,” she panted. “I—I must get down. Sidney—is coming home—to supper; and—the others—Palmer and—”

That was as far as she got. K., watch in hand, found her pulse thin, stringy, irregular. He had been prepared for some such emergency, and he hurried into his room for amyl-nitrate. When he came back she was almost unconscious. There was no time even to call Katie. He broke the capsule in a towel, and held it over her face. After a time the spasm relaxed, but her condition remained alarming.

Harriet, who had come home by that time, sat by the couch and held her sister’s hand. Only once in the next hour or so did she speak. They had sent for Dr. Ed, but he had not come yet. Harriet was too wretched to notice the professional manner in which K. set to work over Anna.

“I’ve been a very hard sister to her,” she said. “If you can pull her through, I’ll try to make up for it.”

Christine sat on the stairs outside, frightened and helpless. They had sent for Sidney; but the little house had no telephone, and the message was slow in getting off.

At six o’clock Dr. Ed came panting up the stairs and into the room. K. stood back.

“Well, this is sad, Harriet,” said Dr. Ed. “Why in the name of Heaven, when I wasn’t around, didn’t you get another doctor. If she had had some amyl-nitrate—”

“I gave her some nitrate of amyl,” said K. quietly. “There was really no time to send for anybody. She almost went under at half-past five.”

Max had kept his word, and even Dr. Ed did not suspect K.‘s secret. He gave a quick glance at this tall young man who spoke so quietly of what he had done for the sick woman, and went on with his work.

Sidney arrived a little after six, and from that moment the confusion in the sick-room was at an end. She moved Christine from the stairs, where Katie on her numerous errands must crawl over her; set Harriet to warming her mother’s bed and getting it ready; opened windows, brought order and quiet. And then, with death in her eyes, she took up her position beside her mother. This was no time for weeping; that would come later. Once she turned to K., standing watchfully beside her.

“I think you have known this for a long time,” she said. And, when he did not answer: “Why did you let me stay away from her? It would have been such a little time!”

“We were trying to do our best for both of you,” he replied.

Anna was unconscious and sinking fast. One thought obsessed Sidney. She repeated it over and over. It came as a cry from the depths of the girl’s new experience.

“She has had so little of life,” she said, over and over. “So little! Just this Street. She never knew anything else.”

And finally K. took it up.

“After all, Sidney,” he said, “the Street IS life: the world is only many streets. She had a great deal. She had love and content, and she had you.”

Anna died a little after midnight, a quiet passing, so that only Sidney and the two men knew when she went away. It was Harriet who collapsed. During all that long evening she had sat looking back over years of small unkindnesses. The thorn of Anna’s inefficiency had always rankled in her flesh. She had been hard, uncompromising, thwarted. And now it was forever too late.

K. had watched Sidney carefully. Once he thought she was fainting, and went to her. But she shook her head.

“I am all right. Do you think you could get them all out of the room and let me have her alone for just a few minutes?”

He cleared the room, and took up his vigil outside the door. And, as he stood there, he thought of what he had said to Sidney about the Street. It was a world of its own. Here in this very house were death and separation; Harriet’s starved life; Christine and Palmer beginning a long and doubtful future together; himself, a failure, and an impostor.

When he opened the door again, Sidney was standing by her mother’s bed. He went to her, and she turned and put her head against his shoulder like a tired child.

“Take me away, K.,” she said pitifully.

And, with his arm around her, he led her out of the room.

Outside of her small immediate circle Anna’s death was hardly felt. The little house went on much as before. Harriet carried back to her business a heaviness of spirit that made it difficult to bear with the small irritations of her day. Perhaps Anna’s incapacity, which had always annoyed her, had been physical. She must have had her trouble a longtime. She remembered other women of the Street who had crept through inefficient days, and had at last laid down their burdens and closed their mild eyes, to the lasting astonishment of their families. What did they think about, these women, as they pottered about? Did they resent the impatience that met their lagging movements, the indifference that would not see how they were failing? Hot tears fell on Harriet’s fashion-book as it lay on her knee. Not only for Anna—for Anna’s prototypes everywhere.

On Sidney—and in less measure, of course, on K.—fell the real brunt of the disaster. Sidney kept up well until after the funeral, but went down the next day with a low fever.

“Overwork and grief,” Dr. Ed said, and sternly forbade the hospital again until Christmas. Morning and evening K. stopped at her door and inquired for her, and morning and evening came Sidney’s reply:—

“Much better. I’ll surely be up tomorrow!”

But the days dragged on and she did not get about.

Downstairs, Christine and Palmer had entered on the round of midwinter gayeties. Palmer’s “crowd” was a lively one. There were dinners and dances, week-end excursions to country-houses. The Street grew accustomed to seeing automobiles stop before the little house at all hours of the night. Johnny Rosenfeld, driving Palmer’s car, took to falling asleep at the wheel in broad daylight, and voiced his discontent to his mother.

“You never know where you are with them guys,” he said briefly. “We start out for half an hour’s run in the evening, and get home with the milk-wagons. And the more some of them have had to drink, the more they want to drive the machine. If I get a chance, I’m going to beat it while the wind’s my way.”

But, talk as he might, in Johnny Rosenfeld’s loyal heart there was no thought of desertion. Palmer had given him a man’s job, and he would stick by it, no matter what came.

There were some things that Johnny Rosenfeld did not tell his mother. There were evenings when the Howe car was filled, not with Christine and her friends, but with women of a different world; evenings when the destination was not a country estate, but a roadhouse; evenings when Johnny Rosenfeld, ousted from the driver’s seat by some drunken youth, would hold tight to the swinging car and say such fragments of prayers as he could remember. Johnny Rosenfeld, who had started life with few illusions, was in danger of losing such as he had.

One such night Christine put in, lying wakefully in her bed, while the clock on the mantel tolled hour after hour into the night. Palmer did not come home at all. He sent a note from the office in the morning:

“I hope you are not worried, darling. The car broke down near the Country Club last night, and there was nothing to do but to spend the night there. I would have sent you word, but I did not want to rouse you. What do you say to the theater tonight and supper afterward?”

Christine was learning. She telephoned the Country Club that morning, and found that Palmer had not been there. But, although she knew now that he was deceiving her, as he always had deceived her, as probably he always would, she hesitated to confront him with what she knew. She shrank, as many a woman has shrunk before, from confronting him with his lie.

But the second time it happened, she was roused. It was almost Christmas then, and Sidney was well on the way to recovery, thinner and very white, but going slowly up and down the staircase on K.‘s arm, and sitting with Harriet and K. at the dinner table. She was begging to be back on duty for Christmas, and K. felt that he would have to give her up soon.

At three o’clock one morning Sidney roused from a light sleep to hear a rapping on her door.

“Is that you, Aunt Harriet?” she called.

“It’s Christine. May I come in?”

Sidney unlocked her door. Christine slipped into the room. She carried a candle, and before she spoke she looked at Sidney’s watch on the bedside table.

“I hoped my clock was wrong,” she said. “I am sorry to waken you, Sidney, but I don’t know what to do.”

“Are you ill?”

“No. Palmer has not come home.”

“What time is it?”

“After three o’clock.”

Sidney had lighted the gas and was throwing on her dressing-gown.

“When he went out did he say—”

“He said nothing. We had been quarreling. Sidney, I am going home in the morning.”

“You don’t mean that, do you?”

“Don’t I look as if I mean it? How much of this sort of thing is a woman supposed to endure?”

“Perhaps he has been delayed. These things always seem terrible in the middle of the night, but by morning—”

Christine whirled on her.

“This isn’t the first time. You remember the letter I got on my wedding day?”

“Yes.”

“He’s gone back to her.”

“Christine! Oh, I am sure you’re wrong. He’s devoted to you. I don’t believe it!”

“Believe it or not,” said Christine doggedly, “that’s exactly what has happened. I got something out of that little rat of a Rosenfeld boy, and the rest I know because I know Palmer. He’s out with her tonight.”

The hospital had taught Sidney one thing: that it took many people to make a world, and that out of these some were inevitably vicious. But vice had remained for her a clear abstraction. There were such people, and because one was in the world for service one cared for them. Even the Saviour had been kind to the woman of the streets.

But here abruptly Sidney found the great injustice of the world—that because of this vice the good suffer more than the wicked. Her young spirit rose in hot rebellion.

“It isn’t fair!” she cried. “It makes me hate all the men in the world. Palmer cares for you, and yet he can do a thing like this!”

Christine was pacing nervously up and down the room. Mere companionship had soothed her. She was now, on the surface at least, less excited than Sidney.

“They are not all like Palmer, thank Heaven,” she said. “There are decent men. My father is one, and your K., here in the house, is another.”

At four o’clock in the morning Palmer Howe came home. Christine met him in the lower hall. He was rather pale, but entirely sober. She confronted him in her straight white gown and waited for him to speak.

“I am sorry to be so late, Chris,” he said. “The fact is, I am all in. I was driving the car out Seven Mile Run. We blew out a tire and the thing turned over.”

Christine noticed then that his right arm was hanging inert by his side.

CHAPTER XVI

Young Howe had been firmly resolved to give up all his bachelor habits with his wedding day. In his indolent, rather selfish way, he was much in love with his wife.

But with the inevitable misunderstandings of the first months of marriage had come a desire to be appreciated once again at his face value. Grace had taken him, not for what he was, but for what he seemed to be. With Christine the veil was rent. She knew him now—all his small indolences, his affectations, his weaknesses. Later on, like other women since the world began, she would learn to dissemble, to affect to believe him what he was not.

Grace had learned this lesson long ago. It was the ABC of her knowledge. And so, back to Grace six weeks after his wedding day came Palmer Howe, not with a suggestion to renew the old relationship, but for comradeship.

Christine sulked—he wanted good cheer; Christine was intolerant—he wanted tolerance; she disapproved of him and showed her disapproval—he wanted approval. He wanted life to be comfortable and cheerful, without recriminations, a little work and much play, a drink when one was thirsty. Distorted though it was, and founded on a wrong basis, perhaps, deep in his heart Palmer’s only longing was for happiness; but this happiness must be of an active sort—not content, which is passive, but enjoyment.

“Come on out,” he said. “I’ve got a car now. No taxi working its head off for us. Just a little run over the country roads, eh?”

It was the afternoon of the day before Christine’s night visit to Sidney. The office had been closed, owing to a death, and Palmer was in possession of a holiday.

“Come on,” he coaxed. “We’ll go out to the Climbing Rose and have supper.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“That’s not true, Grace, and you know it.”

“You and I are through.”

“It’s your doing, not mine. The roads are frozen hard; an hour’s run into the country will bring your color back.”

“Much you care about that. Go and ride with your wife,” said the girl, and flung away from him.

The last few weeks had filled out her thin figure, but she still bore traces of her illness. Her short hair was curled over her head. She looked curiously boyish, almost sexless.

Because she saw him wince when she mentioned Christine, her ill temper increased. She showed her teeth.

“You get out of here,” she said suddenly. “I didn’t ask you to come back. I don’t want you.”

“Good Heavens, Grace! You always knew I would have to marry some day.”

“I was sick; I nearly died. I didn’t hear any reports of you hanging around the hospital to learn how I was getting along.”

He laughed rather sheepishly.

“I had to be careful. You know that as well as I do. I know half the staff there. Besides, one of—” He hesitated over his wife’s name. “A girl I know very well was in the training-school. There would have been the devil to pay if I’d as much as called up.”

“You never told me you were going to get married.”

Cornered, he slipped an arm around her. But she shook him off.

“I meant to tell you, honey; but you got sick. Anyhow, I—I hated to tell you, honey.”

He had furnished the flat for her. There was a comfortable feeling of coming home about going there again. And, now that the worst minute of their meeting was over, he was visibly happier. But Grace continued to stand eyeing him somberly.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” she said. “Don’t have a fit, and don’t laugh. If you do, I’ll—I’ll jump out of the window. I’ve got a place in a store. I’m going to be straight, Palmer.”

“Good for you!”

He meant it. She was a nice girl and he was fond of her. The other was a dog’s life. And he was not unselfish about it. She could not belong to him. He did not want her to belong to any one else.

“One of the nurses in the hospital, a Miss Page, has got me something to do at Lipton and Homburg’s. I am going on for the January white sale. If I make good they will keep me.”

He had put her aside without a qualm; and now he met her announcement with approval. He meant to let her alone. They would have a holiday together, and then they would say good-bye. And she had not fooled him. She still cared. He was getting off well, all things considered. She might have raised a row.

“Good work!” he said. “You’ll be a lot happier. But that isn’t any reason why we shouldn’t be friends, is it? Just friends; I mean that. I would like to feel that I can stop in now and then and say how do you do.”

“I promised Miss Page.”

“Never mind Miss Page.”

The mention of Sidney’s name brought up in his mind Christine as he had left her that morning. He scowled. Things were not going well at home. There was something wrong with Christine. She used to be a good sport, but she had never been the same since the day of the wedding. He thought her attitude toward him was one of suspicion. It made him uncomfortable. But any attempt on his part to fathom it only met with cold silence. That had been her attitude that morning.

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” he said. “We won’t go to any of the old places. I’ve found a new roadhouse in the country that’s respectable enough to suit anybody. We’ll go out to Schwitter’s and get some dinner. I’ll promise to get you back early. How’s that?”

In the end she gave in. And on the way out he lived up to the letter of their agreement. The situation exhilarated him: Grace with her new air of virtue, her new aloofness; his comfortable car; Johnny Rosenfeld’s discreet back and alert ears.

The adventure had all the thrill of a new conquest in it. He treated the girl with deference, did not insist when she refused a cigarette, felt glowingly virtuous and exultant at the same time.

When the car drew up before the Schwitter place, he slipped a five-dollar bill into Johnny Rosenfeld’s not over-clean hand.

“I don’t mind the ears,” he said. “Just watch your tongue, lad.” And Johnny stalled his engine in sheer surprise.

“There’s just enough of the Jew in me,” said Johnny, “to know how to talk a lot and say nothing, Mr. Howe.”

He crawled stiffly out of the car and prepared to crank it.

“I’ll just give her the ‘once over’ now and then,” he said. “She’ll freeze solid if I let her stand.”

Grace had gone up the narrow path to the house. She had the gift of looking well in her clothes, and her small hat with its long quill and her motor-coat were chic and becoming. She never overdressed, as Christine was inclined to do.

Fortunately for Palmer, Tillie did not see him. A heavy German maid waited at the table in the dining-room, while Tillie baked waffles in the kitchen.

Johnny Rosenfeld, going around the side path to the kitchen door with visions of hot coffee and a country supper for his frozen stomach, saw her through the window bending flushed over the stove, and hesitated. Then, without a word, he tiptoed back to the car again, and, crawling into the tonneau, covered himself with rugs. In his untutored mind were certain great qualities, and loyalty to his employer was one. The five dollars in his pocket had nothing whatever to do with it.

At eighteen he had developed a philosophy of four words. It took the place of the Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments, and the Catechism. It was: “Mind your own business.”

The discovery of Tillie’s hiding-place interested but did not thrill him. Tillie was his cousin. If she wanted to do the sort of thing she was doing, that was her affair. Tillie and her middle-aged lover, Palmer Howe and Grace—the alley was not unfamiliar with such relationships. It viewed them with tolerance until they were found out, when it raised its hands.

True to his promise, Palmer wakened the sleeping boy before nine o’clock. Grace had eaten little and drunk nothing; but Howe was slightly stimulated.

“Give her the ‘once over,’” he told Johnny, “and then go back and crawl into the rugs again. I’ll drive in.”

Grace sat beside him. Their progress was slow and rough over the country roads, but when they reached the State road Howe threw open the throttle. He drove well. The liquor was in his blood. He took chances and got away with them, laughing at the girl’s gasps of dismay.

“Wait until I get beyond Simkinsville,” he said, “and I’ll let her out. You’re going to travel tonight, honey.”

The girl sat beside him with her eyes fixed ahead. He had been drinking, and the warmth of the liquor was in his voice. She was determined on one thing. She was going to make him live up to the letter of his promise to go away at the house door; and more and more she realized that it would be difficult. His mood was reckless, masterful. Instead of laughing when she drew back from a proffered caress, he turned surly. Obstinate lines that she remembered appeared from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. She was uneasy.

Finally she hit on a plan to make him stop somewhere in her neighborhood and let her get out of the car. She would not come back after that.

There was another car going toward the city. Now it passed them, and as often they passed it. It became a contest of wits. Palmer’s car lost on the hills, but gained on the long level stretches, which gleamed with a coating of thin ice.

“I wish you’d let them get ahead, Palmer. It’s silly and it’s reckless.”

“I told you we’d travel tonight.”

He turned a little glance at her. What the deuce was the matter with women, anyhow? Were none of them cheerful any more? Here was Grace as sober as Christine. He felt outraged, defrauded.

His light car skidded and struck the big car heavily. On a smooth road perhaps nothing more serious than broken mudguards would have been the result. But on the ice the small car slewed around and slid over the edge of the bank. At the bottom of the declivity it turned over.

Grace was flung clear of the wreckage. Howe freed himself and stood erect, with one arm hanging at his side. There was no sound at all from the boy under the tonneau.

The big car had stopped. Down the bank plunged a heavy, gorilla-like figure, long arms pushing aside the frozen branches of trees. When he reached the car, O’Hara found Grace sitting unhurt on the ground. In the wreck of the car the lamps had not been extinguished, and by their light he made out Howe, swaying dizzily.

“Anybody underneath?”

“The chauffeur. He’s dead, I think. He doesn’t answer.”

The other members of O’Hara’s party had crawled down the bank by that time. With the aid of a jack, they got the car up. Johnny Rosenfeld lay doubled on his face underneath. When he came to and opened his eyes, Grace almost shrieked with relief.

“I’m all right,” said Johnny Rosenfeld. And, when they offered him whiskey: “Away with the fire-water. I am no drinker. I—I—” A spasm of pain twisted his face. “I guess I’ll get up.” With his arms he lifted himself to a sitting position, and fell back again.

“God!” he said. “I can’t move my legs.”

CHAPTER XVII

By Christmas Day Sidney was back in the hospital, a little wan, but valiantly determined to keep her life to its mark of service. She had a talk with K. the night before she left.

Katie was out, and Sidney had put the dining-room in order. K. sat by the table and watched her as she moved about the room.

The past few weeks had been very wonderful to him: to help her up and down the stairs, to read to her in the evenings as she lay on the couch in the sewing-room; later, as she improved, to bring small dainties home for her tray, and, having stood over Katie while she cooked them, to bear them in triumph to that upper room—he had not been so happy in years.

And now it was over. He drew a long breath.

“I hope you don’t feel as if you must stay on,” she said anxiously. “Not that we don’t want you—you know better than that.”

“There is no place else in the whole world that I want to go to,” he said simply.

“I seem to be always relying on somebody’s kindness to—to keep things together. First, for years and years, it was Aunt Harriet; now it is you.”

“Don’t you realize that, instead of your being grateful to me, it is I who am undeniably grateful to you? This is home now. I have lived around—in different places and in different ways. I would rather be here than anywhere else in the world.”

But he did not look at her. There was so much that was hopeless in his eyes that he did not want her to see. She would be quite capable, he told himself savagely, of marrying him out of sheer pity if she ever guessed. And he was afraid—afraid, since he wanted her so much—that he would be fool and weakling enough to take her even on those terms. So he looked away.

Everything was ready for her return to the hospital. She had been out that day to put flowers on the quiet grave where Anna lay with folded hands; she had made her round of little visits on the Street; and now her suitcase, packed, was in the hall.

“In one way, it will be a little better for you than if Christine and Palmer were not in the house. You like Christine, don’t you?”

“Very much.”

“She likes you, K. She depends on you, too, especially since that night when you took care of Palmer’s arm before we got Dr. Max. I often think, K., what a good doctor you would have been. You knew so well what to do for mother.”

She broke off. She still could not trust her voice about her mother.

“Palmer’s arm is going to be quite straight. Dr. Ed is so proud of Max over it. It was a bad fracture.”

He had been waiting for that. Once at least, whenever they were together, she brought Max into the conversation. She was quite unconscious of it.

“You and Max are great friends. I knew you would like him. He is interesting, don’t you think?”

“Very,” said K.

To save his life, he could not put any warmth into his voice. He would be fair. It was not in human nature to expect more of him.

“Those long talks you have, shut in your room—what in the world do you talk about? Politics?”

“Occasionally.”

She was a little jealous of those evenings, when she sat alone, or when Harriet, sitting with her, made sketches under the lamp to the accompaniment of a steady hum of masculine voices from across the hall. Not that she was ignored, of course. Max came in always, before he went, and, leaning over the back of a chair, would inform her of the absolute blankness of life in the hospital without her.

“I go every day because I must,” he would assure her gayly; “but, I tell you, the snap is gone out of it. When there was a chance that every cap was YOUR cap, the mere progress along a corridor became thrilling.” He had a foreign trick of throwing out his hands, with a little shrug of the shoulders. “Cui bono?” he said—which, being translated, means: “What the devil’s the use!”

And K. would stand in the doorway, quietly smoking, or go back to his room and lock away in his trunk the great German books on surgery with which he and Max had been working out a case.

So K. sat by the dining-room table and listened to her talk of Max that last evening together.

“I told Mrs. Rosenfeld to-day not to be too much discouraged about Johnny. I had seen Dr. Max do such wonderful things. Now that you are such friends,”—she eyed him wistfully,—“perhaps some day you will come to one of his operations. Even if you didn’t understand exactly, I know it would thrill you. And—I’d like you to see me in my uniform, K. You never have.”

She grew a little sad as the evening went on. She was going to miss K. very much. While she was ill she had watched the clock for the time to listen for him. She knew the way he slammed the front door. Palmer never slammed the door. She knew too that, just after a bang that threatened the very glass in the transom, K. would come to the foot of the stairs and call:—

“Ahoy, there!”

“Aye, aye,” she would answer—which was, he assured her, the proper response.

Whether he came up the stairs at once or took his way back to Katie had depended on whether his tribute for the day was fruit or sweetbreads.

Now that was all over. They were such good friends. He would miss her, too; but he would have Harriet and Christine and—Max. Back in a circle to Max, of course.

She insisted, that last evening, on sitting up with him until midnight ushered in Christmas Day. Christine and Palmer were out; Harriet, having presented Sidney with a blouse that had been left over in the shop from the autumn’s business, had yawned herself to bed.

When the bells announced midnight, Sidney roused with a start. She realized that neither of them had spoken, and that K.‘s eyes were fixed on her. The little clock on the shelf took up the burden of the churches, and struck the hour in quick staccato notes.

Sidney rose and went over to K., her black dress in soft folds about her.

“He is born, K.”

“He is born, dear.”

She stooped and kissed his cheek lightly.

Christmas Day dawned thick and white. Sidney left the little house at six, with the street light still burning through a mist of falling snow.

The hospital wards and corridors were still lighted when she went on duty at seven o’clock. She had been assigned to the men’s surgical ward, and went there at once. She had not seen Carlotta Harrison since her mother’s death; but she found her on duty in the surgical ward. For the second time in four months, the two girls were working side by side.

Sidney’s recollection of her previous service under Carlotta made her nervous. But the older girl greeted her pleasantly.

“We were all sorry to hear of your trouble,” she said. “I hope we shall get on nicely.”

Sidney surveyed the ward, full to overflowing. At the far end two cots had been placed.

“The ward is heavy, isn’t it?”

“Very. I’ve been almost mad at dressing hour. There are three of us—you, myself, and a probationer.”

The first light of the Christmas morning was coming through the windows. Carlotta put out the lights and turned in a businesslike way to her records.

“The probationer’s name is Wardwell,” she said. “Perhaps you’d better help her with the breakfasts. If there’s any way to make a mistake, she makes it.”

It was after eight when Sidney found Johnny Rosenfeld.

“You here in the ward, Johnny!” she said.

Suffering had refined the boy’s features. His dark, heavily fringed eyes looked at her from a pale face. But he smiled up at her cheerfully.

“I was in a private room; but it cost thirty plunks a week, so I moved. Why pay rent?”

Sidney had not seen him since his accident. She had wished to go, but K. had urged against it. She was not strong, and she had already suffered much. And now the work of the ward pressed hard. She had only a moment. She stood beside him and stroked his hand.

“I’m sorry, Johnny.”

He pretended to think that her sympathy was for his fall from the estate of a private patient to the free ward.

“Oh, I’m all right, Miss Sidney,” he said. “Mr. Howe is paying six dollars a week for me. The difference between me and the other fellows around here is that I get a napkin on my tray and they don’t.”

Before his determined cheerfulness Sidney choked.

“Six dollars a week for a napkin is going some. I wish you’d tell Mr. Howe to give ma the six dollars. She’ll be needing it. I’m no bloated aristocrat; I don’t have to have a napkin.”

“Have they told you what the trouble is?”

“Back’s broke. But don’t let that worry you. Dr. Max Wilson is going to operate on me. I’ll be doing the tango yet.”

Sidney’s eyes shone. Of course, Max could do it. What a thing it was to be able to take this life-in-death of Johnny Rosenfeld’s and make it life again!

All sorts of men made up Sidney’s world: the derelicts who wandered through the ward in flapping slippers, listlessly carrying trays; the unshaven men in the beds, looking forward to another day of boredom, if not of pain; Palmer Howe with his broken arm; K., tender and strong, but filling no especial place in the world. Towering over them all was the younger Wilson. He meant for her, that Christmas morning, all that the other men were not—to their weakness strength, courage, daring, power.

Johnny Rosenfeld lay back on the pillows and watched her face.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “and ran along the Street, calling Dr. Max a dude, I never thought I’d lie here watching that door to see him come in. You have had trouble, too. Ain’t it the hell of a world, anyhow? It ain’t much of a Christmas to you, either.”

Sidney fed him his morning beef tea, and, because her eyes filled up with tears now and then at his helplessness, she was not so skillful as she might have been. When one spoonful had gone down his neck, he smiled up at her whimsically.

“Run for your life. The dam’s burst!” he said.

As much as was possible, the hospital rested on that Christmas Day. The internes went about in fresh white ducks with sprays of mistletoe in their buttonholes, doing few dressings. Over the upper floors, where the kitchens were located, spread toward noon the insidious odor of roasting turkeys. Every ward had its vase of holly. In the afternoon, services were held in the chapel downstairs.

Wheel-chairs made their slow progress along corridors and down elevators. Convalescents who were able to walk flapped along in carpet slippers.

Gradually the chapel filled up. Outside the wide doors of the corridor the wheel-chairs were arranged in a semicircle. Behind them, dressed for the occasion, were the elevator-men, the orderlies, and Big John, who drove the ambulance.

On one side of the aisle, near the front, sat the nurses in rows, in crisp caps and fresh uniforms. On the other side had been reserved a place for the staff. The internes stood back against the wall, ready to run out between rejoicings, as it were—for a cigarette or an ambulance call, as the case might be.

Over everything brooded the after-dinner peace of Christmas afternoon.

The nurses sang, and Sidney sang with them, her fresh young voice rising above the rest. Yellow winter sunlight came through the stained-glass windows and shone on her lovely flushed face, her smooth kerchief, her cap, always just a little awry.

Dr. Max, lounging against the wall, across the chapel, found his eyes straying toward her constantly. How she stood out from the others! What a zest for living and for happiness she had!

The Episcopal clergyman read the Epistle:

“Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated iniquity; therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.”

That was Sidney. She was good, and she had been anointed with the oil of gladness. And he—

His brother was singing. His deep bass voice, not always true, boomed out above the sound of the small organ. Ed had been a good brother to him; he had been a good son.

Max’s vagrant mind wandered away from the service to the picture of his mother over his brother’s littered desk, to the Street, to K., to the girl who had refused to marry him because she did not trust him, to Carlotta last of all. He turned a little and ran his eyes along the line of nurses.

Ah, there she was. As if she were conscious of his scrutiny, she lifted her head and glanced toward him. Swift color flooded her face.

The nurses sang:—

“O holy Child of Bethlehem! Descend to us, we pray; Cast out our sin, and enter in, Be born in us to-day.”

The wheel-chairs and convalescents quavered the familiar words. Dr. Ed’s heavy throat shook with earnestness.

The Head, sitting a little apart with her hands folded in her lap and weary with the suffering of the world, closed her eyes and listened.

The Christmas morning had brought Sidney half a dozen gifts. K. sent her a silver thermometer case with her monogram, Christine a toilet mirror. But the gift of gifts, over which Sidney’s eyes had glowed, was a great box of roses marked in Dr. Max’s copper-plate writing, “From a neighbor.”

Tucked in the soft folds of her kerchief was one of the roses that afternoon.

Services over, the nurses filed out. Max was waiting for Sidney in the corridor.

“Merry Christmas!” he said, and held out his hand.

“Merry Christmas!” she said. “You see!”—she glanced down to the rose she wore. “The others make the most splendid bit of color in the ward.”

“But they were for you!”

“They are not any the less mine because I am letting other people have a chance to enjoy them.”

Under all his gayety he was curiously diffident with her. All the pretty speeches he would have made to Carlotta under the circumstances died before her frank glance.

There were many things he wanted to say to her. He wanted to tell her that he was sorry her mother had died; that the Street was empty without her; that he looked forward to these daily meetings with her as a holy man to his hour before his saint. What he really said was to inquire politely whether she had had her Christmas dinner.

Sidney eyed him, half amused, half hurt.

“What have I done, Max? Is it bad for discipline for us to be good friends?”

“Damn discipline!” said the pride of the staff.

Carlotta was watching them from the chapel. Something in her eyes roused the devil of mischief that always slumbered in him.

“My car’s been stalled in a snowdrift downtown since early this morning, and I have Ed’s Peggy in a sleigh. Put on your things and come for a ride.”

He hoped Carlotta could hear what he said; to be certain of it, he maliciously raised his voice a trifle.

“Just a little run,” he urged. “Put on your warmest things.”

Sidney protested. She was to be free that afternoon until six o’clock; but she had promised to go home.

“K. is alone.”

“K. can sit with Christine. Ten to one, he’s with her now.”

The temptation was very strong. She had been working hard all day. The heavy odor of the hospital, mingled with the scent of pine and evergreen in the chapel; made her dizzy. The fresh outdoors called her. And, besides, if K. were with Christine—

“It’s forbidden, isn’t it?”

“I believe it is.” He smiled at her.

“And yet, you continue to tempt me and expect me to yield!”

“One of the most delightful things about temptation is yielding now and then.”

After all, the situation seemed absurd. Here was her old friend and neighbor asking to take her out for a daylight ride. The swift rebellion of youth against authority surged up in Sidney.

“Very well; I’ll go.”

Carlotta had gone by that time—gone with hate in her heart and black despair. She knew very well what the issue would be. Sidney would drive with him, and he would tell her how lovely she looked with the air on her face and the snow about her. The jerky motion of the little sleigh would throw them close together. How well she knew it all! He would touch Sidney’s hand daringly and smile in her eyes. That was his method: to play at love-making like an audacious boy, until quite suddenly the cloak dropped and the danger was there.

The Christmas excitement had not died out in the ward when Carlotta went back to it. On each bedside table was an orange, and beside it a pair of woolen gloves and a folded white handkerchief. There were sprays of holly scattered about, too, and the after-dinner content of roast turkey and ice-cream.

The lame girl who played the violin limped down the corridor into the ward. She was greeted with silence, that truest tribute, and with the instant composing of the restless ward to peace.

She was pretty in a young, pathetic way, and because to her Christmas was a festival and meant hope and the promise of the young Lord, she played cheerful things.

The ward sat up, remembered that it was not the Sabbath, smiled across from bed to bed.

The probationer, whose name was Wardwell, was a tall, lean girl with a long, pointed nose. She kept up a running accompaniment of small talk to the music.

“Last Christmas,” she said plaintively, “we went out into the country in a hay-wagon and had a real time. I don’t know what I am here for, anyhow. I am a fool.”

“Undoubtedly,” said Carlotta.

“Turkey and goose, mince pie and pumpkin pie, four kinds of cake; that’s the sort of spread we have up in our part of the world. When I think of what I sat down to to-day—!”

She had a profound respect for Carlotta, and her motto in the hospital differed from Sidney’s in that it was to placate her superiors, while Sidney’s had been to care for her patients.

Seeing Carlotta bored, she ventured a little gossip. She had idly glued the label of a medicine bottle on the back of her hand, and was scratching a skull and cross-bones on it.

“I wonder if you have noticed something,” she said, eyes on the label.

“I have noticed that the three-o’clock medicines are not given,” said Carlotta sharply; and Miss Wardwell, still labeled and adorned, made the rounds of the ward.

When she came back she was sulky.

“I’m no gossip,” she said, putting the tray on the table. “If you won’t see, you won’t. That Rosenfeld boy is crying.”

As it was not required that tears be recorded on the record, Carlotta paid no attention to this.

“What won’t I see?”

It required a little urging now. Miss Wardwell swelled with importance and let her superior ask her twice. Then:—

“Dr. Wilson’s crazy about Miss Page.”

A hand seemed to catch Carlotta’s heart and hold it.

“They’re old friends.”

“Piffle! Being an old friend doesn’t make you look at a girl as if you wanted to take a bite out of her. Mark my word, Miss Harrison, she’ll never finish her training; she’ll marry him. I wish,” concluded the probationer plaintively, “that some good-looking fellow like that would take a fancy to me. I’d do him credit. I am as ugly as a mud fence, but I’ve got style.”

She was right, probably. She was long and sinuous, but she wore her lanky, ill-fitting clothes with a certain distinction. Harriet Kennedy would have dressed her in jade green to match her eyes, and with long jade earrings, and made her a fashion.

Carlotta’s lips were dry. The violinist had seen the tears on Johnny Rosenfeld’s white cheeks, and had rushed into rollicking, joyous music. The ward echoed with it. “I’m twenty-one and she’s eighteen,” hummed the ward under its breath. Miss Wardwell’s thin body swayed.

“Lord, how I’d like to dance! If I ever get out of this charnel-house!”

The medicine-tray lay at Carlotta’s elbow; beside it the box of labels. This crude girl was right—right. Carlotta knew it down to the depths of her tortured brain. As inevitably as the night followed the day, she was losing her game. She had lost already, unless—

If she could get Sidney out of the hospital, it would simplify things. She surmised shrewdly that on the Street their interests were wide apart. It was here that they met on common ground.

The lame violin-player limped out of the ward; the shadows of the early winter twilight settled down. At five o’clock Carlotta sent Miss Wardwell to first supper, to the surprise of that seldom surprised person. The ward lay still or shuffled abut quietly. Christmas was over, and there were no evening papers to look forward to.

Carlotta gave the five-o’clock medicines. Then she sat down at the table near the door, with the tray in front of her. There are certain thoughts that are at first functions of the brain; after a long time the spinal cord takes them up and converts them into acts almost automatically. Perhaps because for the last month she had done the thing so often in her mind, its actual performance was almost without conscious thought.

Carlotta took a bottle from her medicine cupboard, and, writing a new label for it, pasted it over the old one. Then she exchanged it for one of the same size on the medicine tray.

In the dining-room, at the probationers’ table, Miss Wardwell was talking.

“Believe me,” she said, “me for the country and the simple life after this. They think I’m only a probationer and don’t see anything, but I’ve got eyes in my head. Harrison is stark crazy over Dr. Wilson, and she thinks I don’t see it. But never mind; I paid, her up to-day for a few of the jolts she has given me.”

Throughout the dining-room busy and competent young women came and ate, hastily or leisurely as their opportunity was, and went on their way again. In their hands they held the keys, not always of life and death perhaps, but of ease from pain, of tenderness, of smooth pillows, and cups of water to thirsty lips. In their eyes, as in Sidney’s, burned the light of service.

But here and there one found women, like Carlotta and Miss Wardwell, who had mistaken their vocation, who railed against the monotony of the life, its limitations, its endless sacrifices. They showed it in their eyes.

Fifty or so against two—fifty who looked out on the world with the fearless glance of those who have seen life to its depths, and, with the broad understanding of actual contact, still found it good. Fifty who were learning or had learned not to draw aside their clean starched skirts from the drab of the streets. And the fifty, who found the very scum of the gutters not too filthy for tenderness and care, let Carlotta and, in lesser measure, the new probationer alone. They could not have voiced their reasons.

The supper-room was filled with their soft voices, the rustle of their skirts, the gleam of their stiff white caps.

When Carlotta came in, she greeted none of them. They did not like her, and she knew it.

Before her, instead of the tidy supper-table, she was seeing the medicine-tray as she had left it.

“I guess I’ve fixed her,” she said to herself.

Her very soul was sick with fear of what she had done.

CHAPTER XVIII

K. saw Sidney for only a moment on Christmas Day. This was when the gay little sleigh had stopped in front of the house.

Sidney had hurried radiantly in for a moment. Christine’s parlor was gay with firelight and noisy with chatter and with the clatter of her tea-cups.

K., lounging indolently in front of the fire, had turned to see Sidney in the doorway, and leaped to his feet.

“I can’t come in,” she cried. “I am only here for a moment. I am out sleigh-riding with Dr. Wilson. It’s perfectly delightful.”

“Ask him in for a cup of tea,” Christine called out. “Here’s Aunt Harriet and mother and even Palmer!”

Christine had aged during the last weeks, but she was putting up a brave front.

“I’ll ask him.”

Sidney ran to the front door and called: “Will you come in for a cup of tea?”

“Tea! Good Heavens, no. Hurry.”

As Sidney turned back into the house, she met Palmer. He had come out in the hall, and had closed the door into the parlor behind him. His arm was still in splints, and swung suspended in a gay silk sling.

The sound of laughter came through the door faintly.

“How is he to-day?” He meant Johnny, of course. The boy’s face was always with him.

“Better in some ways, but of course—”

“When are they going to operate?”

“When he is a little stronger. Why don’t you come into see him?”

“I can’t. That’s the truth. I can’t face the poor youngster.”

“He doesn’t seem to blame you; he says it’s all in the game.”

“Sidney, does Christine know that I was not alone that night?”

“If she guesses, it is not because of anything the boy has said. He has told nothing.”

Out of the firelight, away from the chatter and the laughter, Palmer’s face showed worn and haggard. He put his free hand on Sidney’s shoulder.

“I was thinking that perhaps if I went away—”

“That would be cowardly, wouldn’t it?”

“If Christine would only say something and get it over with! She doesn’t sulk; I think she’s really trying to be kind. But she hates me, Sidney. She turns pale every time I touch her hand.”

All the light had died out of Sidney’s face. Life was terrible, after all—overwhelming. One did wrong things, and other people suffered; or one was good, as her mother had been, and was left lonely, a widow, or like Aunt Harriet. Life was a sham, too. Things were so different from what they seemed to be: Christine beyond the door, pouring tea and laughing with her heart in ashes; Palmer beside her, faultlessly dressed and wretched. The only one she thought really contented was K. He seemed to move so calmly in his little orbit. He was always so steady, so balanced. If life held no heights for him, at least it held no depths.

So Sidney thought, in her ignorance!

“There’s only one thing, Palmer,” she said gravely. “Johnny Rosenfeld is going to have his chance. If anybody in the world can save him, Max Wilson can.”

The light of that speech was in her eyes when she went out to the sleigh again. K. followed her out and tucked the robes in carefully about her.

“Warm enough?”

“All right, thank you.”

“Don’t go too far. Is there any chance of having you home for supper?”

“I think not. I am to go on duty at six again.”

If there was a shadow in K.‘s eyes, she did not see it. He waved them off smilingly from the pavement, and went rather heavily back into the house.

“Just how many men are in love with you, Sidney?” asked Max, as Peggy started up the Street.

“No one that I know of, unless—”

“Exactly. Unless—”

“What I meant,” she said with dignity, “is that unless one counts very young men, and that isn’t really love.”

“We’ll leave out Joe Drummond and myself—for, of course, I am very young. Who is in love with you besides Le Moyne? Any of the internes at the hospital?”

“Me! Le Moyne is not in love with me.”

There was such sincerity in her voice that Wilson was relieved.

K., older than himself and more grave, had always had an odd attraction for women. He had been frankly bored by them, but the fact had remained. And Max more than suspected that now, at last, he had been caught.

“Don’t you really mean that you are in love with Le Moyne?”

“Please don’t be absurd. I am not in love with anybody; I haven’t time to be in love. I have my profession now.”

“Bah! A woman’s real profession is love.”

Sidney differed from this hotly. So warm did the argument become that they passed without seeing a middle-aged gentleman, short and rather heavy set, struggling through a snowdrift on foot, and carrying in his hand a dilapidated leather bag.

Dr. Ed hailed them. But the cutter slipped by and left him knee-deep, looking ruefully after them.

“The young scamp!” he said. “So that’s where Peggy is!”

Nevertheless, there was no anger in Dr. Ed’s mind, only a vague and inarticulate regret. These things that came so easily to Max, the affection of women, gay little irresponsibilities like the stealing of Peggy and the sleigh, had never been his. If there was any faint resentment, it was at himself. He had raised the boy wrong—he had taught him to be selfish. Holding the bag high out of the drifts, he made his slow progress up the Street.

At something after two o’clock that night, K. put down his pipe and listened. He had not been able to sleep since midnight. In his dressing-gown he had sat by the small fire, thinking. The content of his first few months on the Street was rapidly giving way to unrest. He who had meant to cut himself off from life found himself again in close touch with it; his eddy was deep with it.

For the first time, he had begun to question the wisdom of what he had done. Had it been cowardice, after all? It had taken courage, God knew, to give up everything and come away. In a way, it would have taken more courage to have stayed. Had he been right or wrong?

And there was a new element. He had thought, at first, that he could fight down this love for Sidney. But it was increasingly hard. The innocent touch of her hand on his arm, the moment when he had held her in his arms after her mother’s death, the thousand small contacts of her returns to the little house—all these set his blood on fire. And it was fighting blood.

Under his quiet exterior K. fought many conflicts those winter days—over his desk and ledger at the office, in his room alone, with Harriet planning fresh triumphs beyond the partition, even by Christine’s fire, with Christine just across, sitting in silence and watching his grave profile and steady eyes.

He had a little picture of Sidney—a snap-shot that he had taken himself. It showed Sidney minus a hand, which had been out of range when the camera had been snapped, and standing on a steep declivity which would have been quite a level had he held the camera straight. Nevertheless it was Sidney, her hair blowing about her, eyes looking out, tender lips smiling. When she was not at home, it sat on K.‘s dresser, propped against his collar-box. When she was in the house, it lay under the pincushion.

Two o’clock in the morning, then, and K. in his dressing-gown, with the picture propped, not against the collar-box, but against his lamp, where he could see it.

He sat forward in his chair, his hands folded around his knee, and looked at it. He was trying to picture the Sidney of the photograph in his old life—trying to find a place for her. But it was difficult. There had been few women in his old life. His mother had died many years before. There had been women who had cared for him, but he put them impatiently out of his mind.

Then the bell rang.

Christine was moving about below. He could hear her quick steps. Almost before he had heaved his long legs out of the chair, she was tapping at his door outside.

“It’s Mrs. Rosenfeld. She says she wants to see you.”

He went down the stairs. Mrs. Rosenfeld was standing in the lower hall, a shawl about her shoulders. Her face was white and drawn above it.

“I’ve had word to go to the hospital,” she said. “I thought maybe you’d go with me. It seems as if I can’t stand it alone. Oh, Johnny, Johnny!”

“Where’s Palmer?” K. demanded of Christine.

“He’s not in yet.”

“Are you afraid to stay in the house alone?”

“No; please go.”

He ran up the staircase to his room and flung on some clothing. In the lower hall, Mrs. Rosenfeld’s sobs had become low moans; Christine stood helplessly over her.

“I am terribly sorry,” she said—“terribly sorry! When I think whose fault all this is!”

Mrs. Rosenfeld put out a work-hardened hand and caught Christine’s fingers.

“Never mind that,” she said. “You didn’t do it. I guess you and I understand each other. Only pray God you never have a child.”

K. never forgot the scene in the small emergency ward to which Johnny had been taken. Under the white lights his boyish figure looked strangely long. There was a group around the bed—Max Wilson, two or three internes, the night nurse on duty, and the Head.

Sitting just inside the door on a straight chair was Sidney—such a Sidney as he never had seen before, her face colorless, her eyes wide and unseeing, her hands clenched in her lap. When he stood beside her, she did not move or look up. The group around the bed had parted to admit Mrs. Rosenfeld, and closed again. Only Sidney and K. remained by the door, isolated, alone.

“You must not take it like that, dear. It’s sad, of course. But, after all, in that condition—”

It was her first knowledge that he was there. But she did not turn.

“They say I poisoned him.” Her voice was dreary, inflectionless.

“You—what?”

“They say I gave him the wrong medicine; that he’s dying; that I murdered him.” She shivered.

K. touched her hands. They were ice-cold.

“Tell me about it.”

“There is nothing to tell. I came on duty at six o’clock and gave the medicines. When the night nurse came on at seven, everything was all right. The medicine-tray was just as it should be. Johnny was asleep. I went to say good-night to him and he—he was asleep. I didn’t give him anything but what was on the tray,” she finished piteously. “I looked at the label; I always look.”

By a shifting of the group around the bed, K.‘s eyes looked for a moment directly into Carlotta’s. Just for a moment; then the crowd closed up again. It was well for Carlotta that it did. She looked as if she had seen a ghost—closed her eyes, even reeled.

“Miss Harrison is worn out,” Dr. Wilson said brusquely. “Get some one to take her place.”

But Carlotta rallied. After all, the presence of this man in this room at such a time meant nothing. He was Sidney’s friend, that was all.

But her nerve was shaken. The thing had gone beyond her. She had not meant to kill. It was the boy’s weakened condition that was turning her revenge into tragedy.

“I am all right,” she pleaded across the bed to the Head. “Let me stay, please. He’s from my ward. I—I am responsible.”

Wilson was at his wits’ end. He had done everything he knew without result. The boy, rousing for an instant, would lapse again into stupor. With a healthy man they could have tried more vigorous measures—could have forced him to his feet and walked him about, could have beaten him with knotted towels dipped in ice-water. But the wrecked body on the bed could stand no such heroic treatment.

It was Le Moyne, after all, who saved Johnny Rosenfeld’s life. For, when staff and nurses had exhausted all their resources, he stepped forward with a quiet word that brought the internes to their feet astonished.

There was a new treatment for such cases—it had been tried abroad. He looked at Max.

Max had never heard of it. He threw out his hands.

“Try it, for Heaven’s sake,” he said. “I’m all in.”

The apparatus was not in the house—must be extemporized, indeed, at last, of odds and ends from the operating-room. K. did the work, his long fingers deft and skillful—while Mrs. Rosenfeld knelt by the bed with her face buried; while Sidney sat, dazed and bewildered, on her little chair inside the door; while night nurses tiptoed along the corridor, and the night watchman stared incredulous from outside the door.

When the two great rectangles that were the emergency ward windows had turned from mirrors reflecting the room to gray rectangles in the morning light; Johnny Rosenfeld opened his eyes and spoke the first words that marked his return from the dark valley.

“Gee, this is the life!” he said, and smiled into K.‘s watchful face.

When it was clear that the boy would live, K. rose stiffly from the bedside and went over to Sidney’s chair.

“He’s all right now,” he said—“as all right as he can be, poor lad!”

“You did it—you! How strange that you should know such a thing. How am I to thank you?”

The internes, talking among themselves, had wandered down to their dining-room for early coffee. Wilson was giving a few last instructions as to the boy’s care. Quite unexpectedly, Sidney caught K.‘s hand and held it to her lips. The iron repression of the night, of months indeed, fell away before her simple caress.

“My dear, my dear,” he said huskily. “Anything that I can do—for you—at any time—”

It was after Sidney had crept like a broken thing to her room that Carlotta Harrison and K. came face to face. Johnny was quite conscious by that time, a little blue around the lips, but valiantly cheerful.

“More things can happen to a fellow than I ever knew there was!” he said to his mother, and submitted rather sheepishly to her tears and caresses.

“You were always a good boy, Johnny,” she said. “Just you get well enough to come home. I’ll take care of you the rest of my life. We will get you a wheel-chair when you can be about, and I can take you out in the park when I come from work.”

“I’ll be passenger and you’ll be chauffeur, ma.”

“Mr. Le Moyne is going to get your father sent up again. With sixty-five cents a day and what I make, we’ll get along.”

“You bet we will!”

“Oh, Johnny, if I could see you coming in the door again and yelling ‘mother’ and ‘supper’ in one breath!”

The meeting between Carlotta and Le Moyne was very quiet. She had been making a sort of subconscious impression on the retina of his mind during all the night. It would be difficult to tell when he actually knew her.

When the preparations for moving Johnny back to the big ward had been made, the other nurses left the room, and Carlotta and the boy were together. K. stopped her on her way to the door.

“Miss Harrison!”

“Yes, Dr. Edwardes.”

“I am not Dr. Edwardes here; my name is Le Moyne.”

“Ah!”

“I have not seen you since you left St. John’s.”

“No; I—I rested for a few months.”

“I suppose they do not know that you were—that you have had any previous hospital experience.”

“No. Are you going to tell them?”

“I shall not tell them, of course.”

And thus, by simple mutual consent, it was arranged that each should respect the other’s confidence.

Carlotta staggered to her room. There had been a time, just before dawn, when she had had one of those swift revelations that sometimes come at the end of a long night. She had seen herself as she was. The boy was very low, hardly breathing. Her past stretched behind her, a series of small revenges and passionate outbursts, swift yieldings, slow remorse. She dared not look ahead. She would have given every hope she had in the world, just then, for Sidney’s stainless past.

She hated herself with that deadliest loathing that comes of complete self-revelation.

And she carried to her room the knowledge that the night’s struggle had been in vain—that, although Johnny Rosenfeld would live, she had gained nothing by what he had suffered. The whole night had shown her the hopelessness of any stratagem to win Wilson from his new allegiance. She had surprised him in the hallway, watching Sidney’s slender figure as she made her way up the stairs to her room. Never, in all his past overtures to her, had she seen that look in his eyes.

CHAPTER XIX

To Harriet Kennedy, Sidney’s sentence of thirty days’ suspension came as a blow. K. broke the news to her that evening before the time for Sidney’s arrival.

The little household was sharing in Harriet’s prosperity. Katie had a helper now, a little Austrian girl named Mimi. And Harriet had established on the Street the innovation of after-dinner coffee. It was over the after-dinner coffee that K. made his announcement.

“What do you mean by saying she is coming home for thirty days? Is the child ill?”

“Not ill, although she is not quite well. The fact is, Harriet,”—for it was “Harriet” and “K.” by this time,—“there has been a sort of semi-accident up at the hospital. It hasn’t resulted seriously, but—”

Harriet put down the apostle-spoon in her hand and stared across at him.

“Then she has been suspended? What did she do? I don’t believe she did anything!”

“There was a mistake about the medicine, and she was blamed; that’s all.”

“She’d better come home and stay home,” said Harriet shortly. “I hope it doesn’t get in the papers. This dressmaking business is a funny sort of thing. One word against you or any of your family, and the crowd’s off somewhere else.”

“There’s nothing against Sidney,” K. reminded her. “Nothing in the world. I saw the superintendent myself this afternoon. It seems it’s a mere matter of discipline. Somebody made a mistake, and they cannot let such a thing go by. But he believes, as I do, that it was not Sidney.”

However Harriet had hardened herself against the girl’s arrival, all she had meant to say fled when she saw Sidney’s circled eyes and pathetic mouth.

“You child!” she said. “You poor little girl!” And took her corseted bosom.

For the time at least, Sidney’s world had gone to pieces about her. All her brave vaunt of service faded before her disgrace.

When Christine would have seen her, she kept her door locked and asked for just that one evening alone. But after Harriet had retired, and Mimi, the Austrian, had crept out to the corner to mail a letter back to Gratz, Sidney unbolted her door and listened in the little upper hall. Harriet, her head in a towel, her face carefully cold-creamed, had gone to bed; but K.‘s light, as usual, was shining over the transom. Sidney tiptoed to the door.

“K.!”

Almost immediately he opened the door.

“May I come in and talk to you?”

He turned and took a quick survey of the room. The picture was against the collar-box. But he took the risk and held the door wide.

Sidney came in and sat down by the fire. By being adroit he managed to slip the little picture over and under the box before she saw it. It is doubtful if she would have realized its significance, had she seen it.

“I’ve been thinking things over,” she said. “It seems to me I’d better not go back.”

He had left the door carefully open. Men are always more conventional than women.

“That would be foolish, wouldn’t it, when you have done so well? And, besides, since you are not guilty, Sidney—”

“I didn’t do it!” she cried passionately. “I know I didn’t. But I’ve lost faith in myself. I can’t keep on; that’s all there is to it. All last night, in the emergency ward, I felt it going. I clutched at it. I kept saying to myself: ‘You didn’t do it, you didn’t do it’; and all the time something inside of me was saying, ‘Not now, perhaps; but sometime you may.’”

Poor K., who had reasoned all this out for himself and had come to the same impasse!

“To go on like this, feeling that one has life and death in one’s hand, and then perhaps some day to make a mistake like that!” She looked up at him forlornly. “I am just not brave enough, K.”

“Wouldn’t it be braver to keep on? Aren’t you giving up very easily?”

Her world was in pieces about her, and she felt alone in a wide and empty place. And, because her nerves were drawn taut until they were ready to snap, Sidney turned on him shrewishly.

“I think you are all afraid I will come back to stay. Nobody really wants me anywhere—in all the world! Not at the hospital, not here, not anyplace. I am no use.”

“When you say that nobody wants you,” said K., not very steadily, “I—I think you are making a mistake.”

“Who?” she demanded. “Christine? Aunt Harriet? Katie? The only person who ever really wanted me was my mother, and I went away and left her!”

She scanned his face closely, and, reading there something she did not understand, she colored suddenly.

“I believe you mean Joe Drummond.”

“No; I do not mean Joe Drummond.”

If he had found any encouragement in her face, he would have gone on recklessly; but her blank eyes warned him.

“If you mean Max Wilson,” said Sidney, “you are entirely wrong. He’s not in love with me—not, that is, any more than he is in love with a dozen girls. He likes to be with me—oh, I know that; but that doesn’t mean—anything else. Anyhow, after this disgrace—”

“There is no disgrace, child.”

“He’ll think me careless, at the least. And his ideals are so high, K.”

“You say he likes to be with you. What about you?”

Sidney had been sitting in a low chair by the fire. She rose with a sudden passionate movement. In the informality of the household, she, had visited K. in her dressing-gown and slippers; and now she stood before him, a tragic young figure, clutching the folds of her gown across her breast.

“I worship him, K.,” she said tragically. “When I see him coming, I want to get down and let him walk on me. I know his step in the hall. I know the very way he rings for the elevator. When I see him in the operating-room, cool and calm while every one else is flustered and excited, he—he looks like a god.”

Then, half ashamed of her outburst, she turned her back to him and stood gazing at the small coal fire. It was as well for K. that she did not see his face. For that one moment the despair that was in him shone in his eyes. He glanced around the shabby little room, at the sagging bed, the collar-box, the pincushion, the old marble-topped bureau under which Reginald had formerly made his nest, at his untidy table, littered with pipes and books, at the image in the mirror of his own tall figure, stooped and weary.

“It’s real, all this?” he asked after a pause. “You’re sure it’s not just—glamour, Sidney?”

“It’s real—terribly real.” Her voice was muffled, and he knew then that she was crying.

She was mightily ashamed of it. Tears, of course, except in the privacy of one’s closet, were not ethical on the Street.

“Perhaps he cares very much, too.”

“Give me a handkerchief,” said Sidney in a muffled tone, and the little scene was broken into while K. searched through a bureau drawer. Then:

“It’s all over, anyhow, since this. If he’d really cared he’d have come over tonight. When one is in trouble one needs friends.”

Back in a circle she came inevitably to her suspension. She would never go back, she said passionately. She was innocent, had been falsely accused. If they could think such a thing about her, she didn’t want to be in their old hospital.

K. questioned her, alternately soothing and probing.

“You are positive about it?”

“Absolutely. I have given him his medicines dozens of times.”

“You looked at the label?”

“I swear I did, K.”

“Who else had access to the medicine closet?”

“Carlotta Harrison carried the keys, of course. I was off duty from four to six. When Carlotta left the ward, the probationer would have them.”

“Have you reason to think that either one of these girls would wish you harm?”

“None whatever,” began Sidney vehemently; and then, checking herself,—“unless—but that’s rather ridiculous.”

“What is ridiculous?”

“I’ve sometimes thought that Carlotta—but I am sure she is perfectly fair with me. Even if she—if she—”

“Yes?”

“Even if she likes Dr. Wilson, I don’t believe—Why, K., she wouldn’t! It would be murder.”

“Murder, of course,” said K., “in intention, anyhow. Of course she didn’t do it. I’m only trying to find out whose mistake it was.”

Soon after that she said good-night and went out. She turned in the doorway and smiled tremulously back at him.

“You have done me a lot of good. You almost make me believe in myself.”

“That’s because I believe in you.”

With a quick movement that was one of her charms, Sidney suddenly closed the door and slipped back into the room. K., hearing the door close, thought she had gone, and dropped heavily into a chair.

“My best friend in all the world!” said Sidney suddenly from behind him, and, bending over, she kissed him on the cheek.

The next instant the door had closed behind her, and K. was left alone to such wretchedness and bliss as the evening had brought him.

On toward morning, Harriet, who slept but restlessly in her towel, wakened to the glare of his light over the transom.

“K.!” she called pettishly from her door. “I wish you wouldn’t go to sleep and let your light burn!”

K., surmising the towel and cold cream, had the tact not to open his door.

“I am not asleep, Harriet, and I am sorry about the light. It’s going out now.”

Before he extinguished the light, he walked over to the old dresser and surveyed himself in the glass. Two nights without sleep and much anxiety had told on him. He looked old, haggard; infinitely tired. Mentally he compared himself with Wilson, flushed with success, erect, triumphant, almost insolent. Nothing had more certainly told him the hopelessness of his love for Sidney than her good-night kiss. He was her brother, her friend. He would never be her lover. He drew a long breath and proceeded to undress in the dark.

Joe Drummond came to see Sidney the next day. She would have avoided him if she could, but Mimi had ushered him up to the sewing-room boudoir before she had time to escape. She had not seen the boy for two months, and the change in him startled her. He was thinner, rather hectic, scrupulously well dressed.

“Why, Joe!” she said, and then: “Won’t you sit down?”

He was still rather theatrical. He dramatized himself, as he had that night the June before when he had asked Sidney to marry him. He stood just inside the doorway. He offered no conventional greeting whatever; but, after surveying her briefly, her black gown, the lines around her eyes:—

“You’re not going back to that place, of course?”

“I—I haven’t decided.”

“Then somebody’s got to decide for you. The thing for you to do is to stay right here, Sidney. People know you on the Street. Nobody here would ever accuse you of trying to murder anybody.”

In spite of herself, Sidney smiled a little.

“Nobody thinks I tried to murder him. It was a mistake about the medicines. I didn’t do it, Joe.”

His love was purely selfish, for he brushed aside her protest as if she had not spoken.

“You give me the word and I’ll go and get your things; I’ve got a car of my own now.”

“But, Joe, they have only done what they thought was right. Whoever made it, there was a mistake.”

He stared at her incredulously.

“You don’t mean that you are going to stand for this sort of thing? Every time some fool makes a mistake, are they going to blame it on you?”

“Please don’t be theatrical. Come in and sit down. I can’t talk to you if you explode like a rocket all the time.”

Her matter-of-fact tone had its effect. He advanced into the room, but he still scorned a chair.

“I guess you’ve been wondering why you haven’t heard from me,” he said. “I’ve seen you more than you’ve seen me.”

Sidney looked uneasy. The idea of espionage is always repugnant, and to have a rejected lover always in the offing, as it were, was disconcerting.

“I wish you would be just a little bit sensible, Joe. It’s so silly of you, really. It’s not because you care for me; it’s really because you care for yourself.”

“You can’t look at me and say that, Sid.”

He ran his finger around his collar—an old gesture; but the collar was very loose. He was thin; his neck showed it.

“I’m just eating my heart out for you, and that’s the truth. And it isn’t only that. Everywhere I go, people say, ‘There’s the fellow Sidney Page turned down when she went to the hospital.’ I’ve got so I keep off the Street as much as I can.”

Sidney was half alarmed, half irritated. This wild, excited boy was not the doggedly faithful youth she had always known. It seemed to her that he was hardly sane—that underneath his quiet manner and carefully repressed voice there lurked something irrational, something she could not cope with. She looked up at him helplessly.

“But what do you want me to do? You—you almost frighten me. If you’d only sit down—”

“I want you to come home. I’m not asking anything else now. I just want you to come back, so that things will be the way they used to be. Now that they have turned you out—”

“They’ve done nothing of the sort. I’ve told you that.”

“You’re going back?”

“Absolutely.”

“Because you love the hospital, or because you love somebody connected with the hospital?”

Sidney was thoroughly angry by this time, angry and reckless. She had come through so much that every nerve was crying in passionate protest.

“If it will make you understand things any better,” she cried, “I am going back for both reasons!”

She was sorry the next moment. But her words seemed, surprisingly enough, to steady him. For the first time, he sat down.

“Then, as far as I am concerned, it’s all over, is it?”

“Yes, Joe. I told you that long ago.”

He seemed hardly to be listening. His thoughts had ranged far ahead. Suddenly:—

“You think Christine has her hands full with Palmer, don’t you? Well, if you take Max Wilson, you’re going to have more trouble than Christine ever dreamed of. I can tell you some things about him now that will make you think twice.”

But Sidney had reached her limit. She went over and flung open the door.

“Every word that you say shows me how right I am in not marrying you, Joe,” she said. “Real men do not say those things about each other under any circumstances. You’re behaving like a bad boy. I don’t want you to come back until you have grown up.”

He was very white, but he picked up his hat and went to the door.

“I guess I AM crazy,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to go away, but mother raises such a fuss—I’ll not annoy you any more.”

He reached in his pocket and, pulling out a small box, held it toward her. The lid was punched full of holes.

“Reginald,” he said solemnly. “I’ve had him all winter. Some boys caught him in the park, and I brought him home.”

He left her standing there speechless with surprise, with the box in her hand, and ran down the stairs and out into the Street. At the foot of the steps he almost collided with Dr. Ed.

“Back to see Sidney?” said Dr. Ed genially. “That’s fine, Joe. I’m glad you’ve made it up.”

The boy went blindly down the Street.

CHAPTER XX

Winter relaxed its clutch slowly that year. March was bitterly cold; even April found the roads still frozen and the hedgerows clustered with ice. But at mid-day there was spring in the air. In the courtyard of the hospital, convalescents sat on the benches and watched for robins. The fountain, which had frozen out, was being repaired. Here and there on ward windowsills tulips opened their gaudy petals to the sun.

Harriet had gone abroad for a flying trip in March and came back laden with new ideas, model gowns, and fresh enthusiasm. She carried out and planted flowers on her sister’s grave, and went back to her work with a feeling of duty done. A combination of crocuses and snow on the ground had given her an inspiration for a gown. She drew it in pencil on an envelope on her way back in the street car.

Grace Irving, having made good during the white sales, had been sent to the spring cottons. She began to walk with her head higher. The day she sold Sidney material for a simple white gown, she was very happy. Once a customer brought her a bunch of primroses. All day she kept them under the counter in a glass of water, and at evening she took them to Johnny Rosenfeld, still lying prone in the hospital.

On Sidney, on K., and on Christine the winter had left its mark heavily. Christine, readjusting her life to new conditions, was graver, more thoughtful. She was alone most of the time now. Under K.‘s guidance, she had given up the “Duchess” and was reading real books. She was thinking real thoughts, too, for the first time in her life.

Sidney, as tender as ever, had lost a little of the radiance from her eyes; her voice had deepened. Where she had been a pretty girl, she was now lovely. She was back in the hospital again, this time in the children’s ward. K., going in one day to take Johnny Rosenfeld a basket of fruit, saw her there with a child in her arms, and a light in her eyes that he had never seen before. It hurt him, rather—things being as they were with him. When he came out he looked straight ahead.

With the opening of spring the little house at Hillfoot took on fresh activities. Tillie was house-cleaning with great thoroughness. She scrubbed carpets, took down the clean curtains, and put them up again freshly starched. It was as if she found in sheer activity and fatigue a remedy for her uneasiness.

Business had not been very good. The impeccable character of the little house had been against it. True, Mr. Schwitter had a little bar and served the best liquors he could buy; but he discouraged rowdiness—had been known to refuse to sell to boys under twenty-one and to men who had already overindulged. The word went about that Schwitter’s was no place for a good time. Even Tillie’s chicken and waffles failed against this handicap.

By the middle of April the house-cleaning was done. One or two motor parties had come out, dined sedately and wined moderately, and had gone back to the city again. The next two weeks saw the weather clear. The roads dried up, robins filled the trees with their noisy spring songs, and still business continued dull.

By the first day of May, Tillie’s uneasiness had become certainty. On that morning Mr. Schwitter, coming in from the early milking, found her sitting in the kitchen, her face buried in her apron. He put down the milk-pails and, going over to her, put a hand on her head.

“I guess there’s no mistake, then?”

“There’s no mistake,” said poor Tillie into her apron.

He bent down and kissed the back of her neck. Then, when she failed to brighten, he tiptoed around the kitchen, poured the milk into pans, and rinsed the buckets, working methodically in his heavy way. The tea-kettle had boiled dry. He filled that, too. Then:—

“Do you want to see a doctor?”

“I’d better see somebody,” she said, without looking up. “And—don’t think I’m blaming you. I guess I don’t really blame anybody. As far as that goes, I’ve wanted a child right along. It isn’t the trouble I am thinking of either.”

He nodded. Words were unnecessary between them. He made some tea clumsily and browned her a piece of toast. When he had put them on one end of the kitchen table, he went over to her again.

“I guess I’d ought to have thought of this before, but all I thought of was trying to get a little happiness out of life. And,”—he stroked her arm,—“as far as I am concerned, it’s been worth while, Tillie. No matter what I’ve had to do, I’ve always looked forward to coming back here to you in the evening. Maybe I don’t say it enough, but I guess you know I feel it all right.”

Without looking up, she placed her hand over his.

“I guess we started wrong,” he went on. “You can’t build happiness on what isn’t right. You and I can manage well enough; but now that there’s going to be another, it looks different, somehow.”

After that morning Tillie took up her burden stoically. The hope of motherhood alternated with black fits of depression. She sang at her work, to burst out into sudden tears.

Other things were not going well. Schwitter had given up his nursery business; but the motorists who came to Hillfoot did not come back. When, at last, he took the horse and buggy and drove about the country for orders, he was too late. Other nurserymen had been before him; shrubberies and orchards were already being set out. The second payment on his mortgage would be due in July. By the middle of May they were frankly up against it. Schwitter at last dared to put the situation into words.

“We’re not making good, Til,” he said. “And I guess you know the reason. We are too decent; that’s what’s the matter with us.” There was no irony in his words.

With all her sophistication, Tillie was vastly ignorant of life. He had to explain.

“We’ll have to keep a sort of hotel,” he said lamely. “Sell to everybody that comes along, and—if parties want to stay over-night—”

Tillie’s white face turned crimson.

He attempted a compromise. “If it’s bad weather, and they’re married—”

“How are we to know if they are married or not?”

He admired her very much for it. He had always respected her. But the situation was not less acute. There were two or three unfurnished rooms on the second floor. He began to make tentative suggestions as to their furnishing. Once he got a catalogue from an installment house, and tried to hide it from her. Tillie’s eyes blazed. She burned it in the kitchen stove.

Schwitter himself was ashamed; but the idea obsessed him. Other people fattened on the frailties of human nature. Two miles away, on the other road, was a public house that had netted the owner ten thousand dollars profit the year before. They bought their beer from the same concern. He was not as young as he had been; there was the expense of keeping his wife—he had never allowed her to go into the charity ward at the asylum. Now that there was going to be a child, there would be three people dependent upon him. He was past fifty, and not robust.

One night, after Tillie was asleep, he slipped noiselessly into his clothes and out to the barn, where he hitched up the horse with nervous fingers.

Tillie never learned of that midnight excursion to the “Climbing Rose,” two miles away. Lights blazed in every window; a dozen automobiles were parked before the barn. Somebody was playing a piano. From the bar came the jingle of glasses and loud, cheerful conversation.

When Schwitter turned the horse’s head back toward Hillfoot, his mind was made up. He would furnish the upper rooms; he would bring a barkeeper from town—these people wanted mixed drinks; he could get a second-hand piano somewhere.

Tillie’s rebellion was instant and complete. When she found him determined, she made the compromise that her condition necessitated. She could not leave him, but she would not stay in the rehabilitated little house. When, a week after Schwitter’s visit to the “Climbing Rose,” an installment van arrived from town with the new furniture, Tillie moved out to what had been the harness-room of the old barn and there established herself.

“I am not leaving you,” she told him. “I don’t even know that I am blaming you. But I am not going to have anything to do with it, and that’s flat.”

So it happened that K., making a spring pilgrimage to see Tillie, stopped astounded in the road. The weather was warm, and he carried his Norfolk coat over his arm. The little house was bustling; a dozen automobiles were parked in the barnyard. The bar was crowded, and a barkeeper in a white coat was mixing drinks with the casual indifference of his kind. There were tables under the trees on the lawn, and a new sign on the gate.

Even Schwitter bore a new look of prosperity. Over his schooner of beer K. gathered something of the story.

“I’m not proud of it, Mr. Le Moyne. I’ve come to do a good many things the last year or so that I never thought I would do. But one thing leads to another. First I took Tillie away from her good position, and after that nothing went right. Then there were things coming on”—he looked at K. anxiously—“that meant more expense. I would be glad if you wouldn’t say anything about it at Mrs. McKee’s.”

“I’ll not speak of it, of course.”

It was then, when K. asked for Tillie, that Mr. Schwitter’s unhappiness became more apparent.

“She wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “She moved out the day I furnished the rooms upstairs and got the piano.”

“Do you mean she has gone?”

“As far as the barn. She wouldn’t stay in the house. I—I’ll take you out there, if you would like to see her.”

K. shrewdly surmised that Tillie would prefer to see him alone, under the circumstances.

“I guess I can find her,” he said, and rose from the little table.

“If you—if you can say anything to help me out, sir, I’d appreciate it. Of course, she understands how I am driven. But—especially if you would tell her that the Street doesn’t know—”

“I’ll do all I can,” K. promised, and followed the path to the barn.

Tillie received him with a certain dignity. The little harness-room was very comfortable. A white iron bed in a corner, a flat table with a mirror above it, a rocking-chair, and a sewing-machine furnished the room.

“I wouldn’t stand for it,” she said simply; “so here I am. Come in, Mr. Le Moyne.”

There being but one chair, she sat on the bed. The room was littered with small garments in the making. She made no attempt to conceal them; rather, she pointed to them with pride.

“I am making them myself. I have a lot of time these days. He’s got a hired girl at the house. It was hard enough to sew at first, with me making two right sleeves almost every time.” Then, seeing his kindly eye on her: “Well, it’s happened, Mr. Le Moyne. What am I going to do? What am I going to be?”

“You’re going to be a very good mother, Tillie.”

She was manifestly in need of cheering. K., who also needed cheering that spring day, found his consolation in seeing her brighten under the small gossip of the Street. The deaf-and-dumb book agent had taken on life insurance as a side issue, and was doing well; the grocery store at the corner was going to be torn down, and over the new store there were to be apartments; Reginald had been miraculously returned, and was building a new nest under his bureau; Harriet Kennedy had been to Paris, and had brought home six French words and a new figure.

Outside the open door the big barn loomed cool and shadowy, full of empty spaces where later the hay would be stored; anxious mother hens led their broods about; underneath in the horse stable the restless horses pawed in their stalls. From where he sat, Le Moyne could see only the round breasts of the two hills, the fresh green of the orchard the cows in a meadow beyond.

Tillie followed his eyes.

“I like it here,” she confessed. “I’ve had more time to think since I moved out than I ever had in my life before. Them hills help. When the noise is worst down at the house, I look at the hills there and—”

There were great thoughts in her mind—that the hills meant God, and that in His good time perhaps it would all come right. But she was inarticulate. “The hills help a lot,” she repeated.

K. rose. Tillie’s work-basket lay near him. He picked up one of the little garments. In his big hands it looked small, absurd.

“I—I want to tell you something, Tillie. Don’t count on it too much; but Mrs. Schwitter has been failing rapidly for the last month or two.”

Tillie caught his arm.

“You’ve seen her?”

“I was interested. I wanted to see things work out right for you.”

All the color had faded from Tillie’s face.

“You’re very good to me, Mr. Le Moyne,” she said. “I don’t wish the poor soul any harm, but—oh, my God! if she’s going, let it be before the next four months are over.”

K. had fallen into the habit, after his long walks, of dropping into Christine’s little parlor for a chat before he went upstairs. Those early spring days found Harriet Kennedy busy late in the evenings, and, save for Christine and K., the house was practically deserted.

The breach between Palmer and Christine was steadily widening. She was too proud to ask him to spend more of his evenings with her. On those occasions when he voluntarily stayed at home with her, he was so discontented that he drove her almost to distraction. Although she was convinced that he was seeing nothing of the girl who had been with him the night of the accident, she did not trust him. Not that girl, perhaps, but there were others. There would always be others.

Into Christine’s little parlor, then, K. turned, the evening after he had seen Tillie. She was reading by the lamp, and the door into the hall stood open.

“Come in,” she said, as he hesitated in the doorway.

“I am frightfully dusty.”

“There’s a brush in the drawer of the hat-rack—although I don’t really mind how you look.”

The little room always cheered K. Its warmth and light appealed to his aesthetic sense; after the bareness of his bedroom, it spelled luxury. And perhaps, to be entirely frank, there was more than physical comfort and satisfaction in the evenings he spent in Christine’s firelit parlor. He was entirely masculine, and her evident pleasure in his society gratified him. He had fallen into a way of thinking of himself as a sort of older brother to all the world because he was a sort of older brother to Sidney. The evenings with her did something to reinstate him in his own self-esteem. It was subtle, psychological, but also it was very human.

“Come and sit down,” said Christine. “Here’s a chair, and here are cigarettes and there are matches. Now!”

But, for once, K. declined the chair. He stood in front of the fireplace and looked down at her, his head bent slightly to one side.

“I wonder if you would like to do a very kind thing,” he said unexpectedly.

“Make you coffee?”

“Something much more trouble and not so pleasant.”

Christine glanced up at him. When she was with him, when his steady eyes looked down at her, small affectations fell away. She was more genuine with K. than with anyone else, even herself.

“Tell me what it is, or shall I promise first?”

“I want you to promise just one thing: to keep a secret.”

“Yours?”

Christine was not over-intelligent, perhaps, but she was shrewd. That Le Moyne’s past held a secret she had felt from the beginning. She sat up with eager curiosity.

“No, not mine. Is it a promise?”

“Of course.”

“I’ve found Tillie, Christine. I want you to go out to see her.”

Christine’s red lips parted. The Street did not go out to see women in Tillie’s situation.

“But, K.!” she protested.

“She needs another woman just now. She’s going to have a child, Christine; and she has had no one to talk to but her hus—but Mr. Schwitter and myself. She is depressed and not very well.”

“But what shall I say to her? I’d really rather not go, K. Not,” she hastened to set herself right in his eyes—“not that I feel any unwillingness to see her. I know you understand that. But—what in the world shall I say to her?”

“Say what your own kind heart prompts.”

It had been rather a long time since Christine had been accused of having a kind heart. Not that she was unkind, but in all her self-centered young life there had been little call on her sympathies. Her eyes clouded.

“I wish I were as good as you think I am.”

There was a little silence between them. Then Le Moyne spoke briskly:—

“I’ll tell you how to get there; perhaps I would better write it.”

He moved over to Christine’s small writing-table and, seating himself, proceeded to write out the directions for reaching Hillfoot.

Behind him, Christine had taken his place on the hearth-rug and stood watching his head in the light of the desk-lamp. “What a strong, quiet face it is,” she thought. Why did she get the impression of such a tremendous reserve power in this man who was a clerk, and a clerk only? Behind him she made a quick, unconscious gesture of appeal, both hands out for an instant. She dropped them guiltily as K. rose with the paper in his hand.

“I’ve drawn a sort of map of the roads,” he began. “You see, this—”

Christine was looking, not at the paper, but up at him.

“I wonder if you know, K.,” she said, “what a lucky woman the woman will be who marries you?”

He laughed good-humoredly.

“I wonder how long I could hypnotize her into thinking that.”

He was still holding out the paper.

“I’ve had time to do a little thinking lately,” she said, without bitterness. “Palmer is away so much now. I’ve been looking back, wondering if I ever thought that about him. I don’t believe I ever did. I wonder—”

She checked herself abruptly and took the paper from his hand.

“I’ll go to see Tillie, of course,” she consented. “It is like you to have found her.”

She sat down. Although she picked up the book that she had been reading with the evident intention of discussing it, her thoughts were still on Tillie, on Palmer, on herself. After a moment:—

“Has it ever occurred to you how terribly mixed up things are? Take this Street, for instance. Can you think of anybody on it that—that things have gone entirely right with?”

“It’s a little world of its own, of course,” said K., “and it has plenty of contact points with life. But wherever one finds people, many or few, one finds all the elements that make up life—joy and sorrow, birth and death, and even tragedy. That’s rather trite, isn’t it?”

Christine was still pursuing her thoughts.

“Men are different,” she said. “To a certain extent they make their own fates. But when you think of the women on the Street,—Tillie, Harriet Kennedy, Sidney Page, myself, even Mrs. Rosenfeld back in the alley,—somebody else moulds things for us, and all we can do is to sit back and suffer. I am beginning to think the world is a terrible place, K. Why do people so often marry the wrong people? Why can’t a man care for one woman and only one all his life? Why—why is it all so complicated?”

“There are men who care for only one woman all their lives.”

“You’re that sort, aren’t you?”

“I don’t want to put myself on any pinnacle. If I cared enough for a woman to marry her, I’d hope to—But we are being very tragic, Christine.”

“I feel tragic. There’s going to be another mistake, K., unless you stop it.”

He tried to leaven the conversation with a little fun.

“If you’re going to ask me to interfere between Mrs. McKee and the deaf-and-dumb book and insurance agent, I shall do nothing of the sort. She can both speak and hear enough for both of them.”

“I mean Sidney and Max Wilson. He’s mad about her, K.; and, because she’s the sort she is, he’ll probably be mad about her all his life, even if he marries her. But he’ll not be true to her; I know the type now.”

K. leaned back with a flicker of pain in his eyes.

“What can I do about it?”

Astute as he was, he did not suspect that Christine was using this method to fathom his feeling for Sidney. Perhaps she hardly knew it herself.

“You might marry her yourself, K.”

But he had himself in hand by this time, and she learned nothing from either his voice or his eyes.

“On twenty dollars a week? And without so much as asking her consent?” He dropped his light tone. “I’m not in a position to marry anybody. Even if Sidney cared for me, which she doesn’t, of course—”

“Then you don’t intend to interfere? You’re going to let the Street see another failure?”

“I think you can understand,” said K. rather wearily, “that if I cared less, Christine, it would be easier to interfere.”

After all, Christine had known this, or surmised it, for weeks. But it hurt like a fresh stab in an old wound. It was K. who spoke again after a pause:—

“The deadly hard thing, of course, is to sit by and see things happening that one—that one would naturally try to prevent.”

“I don’t believe that you have always been of those who only stand and wait,” said Christine. “Sometime, K., when you know me better and like me better, I want you to tell me about it, will you?”

“There’s very little to tell. I held a trust. When I discovered that I was unfit to hold that trust any longer, I quit. That’s all.”

His tone of finality closed the discussion. But Christine’s eyes were on him often that evening, puzzled, rather sad.

They talked of books, of music—Christine played well in a dashing way. K. had brought her soft, tender little things, and had stood over her until her noisy touch became gentle. She played for him a little, while he sat back in the big chair with his hand screening his eyes.

When, at last, he rose and picked up his cap; it was nine o’clock.

“I’ve taken your whole evening,” he said remorsefully. “Why don’t you tell me I am a nuisance and send me off?”

Christine was still at the piano, her hands on the keys. She spoke without looking at him:—

“You’re never a nuisance, K., and—”

“You’ll go out to see Tillie, won’t you?”

“Yes. But I’ll not go under false pretenses. I am going quite frankly because you want me to.”

Something in her tone caught his attention.

“I forgot to tell you,” she went on. “Father has given Palmer five thousand dollars. He’s going to buy a share in a business.”

“That’s fine.”

“Possibly. I don’t believe much in Palmer’s business ventures.”

Her flat tone still held him. Underneath it he divined strain and repression.

“I hate to go and leave you alone,” he said at last from the door. “Have you any idea when Palmer will be back?”

“Not the slightest. K., will you come here a moment? Stand behind me; I don’t want to see you, and I want to tell you something.”

He did as she bade him, rather puzzled.

“Here I am.”

“I think I am a fool for saying this. Perhaps I am spoiling the only chance I have to get any happiness out of life. But I have got to say it. It’s stronger than I am. I was terribly unhappy, K., and then you came into my life, and I—now I listen for your step in the hall. I can’t be a hypocrite any longer, K.”

When he stood behind her, silent and not moving, she turned slowly about and faced him. He towered there in the little room, grave eyes on hers.

“It’s a long time since I have had a woman friend, Christine,” he said soberly. “Your friendship has meant a good deal. In a good many ways, I’d not care to look ahead if it were not for you. I value our friendship so much that I—”

“That you don’t want me to spoil it,” she finished for him. “I know you don’t care for me, K., not the way I—But I wanted you to know. It doesn’t hurt a good man to know such a thing. And it—isn’t going to stop your coming here, is it?”

“Of course not,” said K. heartily. “But tomorrow, when we are both clearheaded, we will talk this over. You are mistaken about this thing, Christine; I am sure of that. Things have not been going well, and just because I am always around, and all that sort of thing, you think things that aren’t really so. I’m only a reaction, Christine.”

He tried to make her smile up at him. But just then she could not smile.

If she had cried, things might have been different for every one; for perhaps K. would have taken her in his arms. He was heart-hungry enough, those days, for anything. And perhaps, too, being intuitive, Christine felt this. But she had no mind to force him into a situation against his will.

“It is because you are good,” she said, and held out her hand. “Good-night.”

Le Moyne took it and bent over and kissed it lightly. There was in the kiss all that he could not say of respect, of affection and understanding.

“Good-night, Christine,” he said, and went into the hall and upstairs.

The lamp was not lighted in his room, but the street light glowed through the windows. Once again the waving fronds of the ailanthus tree flung ghostly shadows on the walls. There was a faint sweet odor of blossoms, so soon to become rank and heavy.

Over the floor in a wild zigzag darted a strip of white paper which disappeared under the bureau. Reginald was building another nest.

CHAPTER XXI

Sidney went into the operating-room late in the spring as the result of a conversation between the younger Wilson and the Head.

“When are you going to put my protegee into the operating-room?” asked Wilson, meeting Miss Gregg in a corridor one bright, spring afternoon.

“That usually comes in the second year, Dr. Wilson.”

He smiled down at her. “That isn’t a rule, is it?”

“Not exactly. Miss Page is very young, and of course there are other girls who have not yet had the experience. But, if you make the request—”

“I am going to have some good cases soon. I’ll not make a request, of course; but, if you see fit, it would be good training for Miss Page.”

Miss Gregg went on, knowing perfectly that at his next operation Dr. Wilson would expect Sidney Page in the operating-room. The other doctors were not so exigent. She would have liked to have all the staff old and settled, like Dr. O’Hara or the older Wilson. These young men came in and tore things up.

She sighed as she went on. There were so many things to go wrong. The butter had been bad—she must speak to the matron. The sterilizer in the operating-room was out of order—that meant a quarrel with the chief engineer. Requisitions were too heavy—that meant going around to the wards and suggesting to the head nurses that lead pencils and bandages and adhesive plaster and safety-pins cost money.

It was particularly inconvenient to move Sidney just then. Carlotta Harrison was off duty, ill. She had been ailing for a month, and now she was down with a temperature. As the Head went toward Sidney’s ward, her busy mind was playing her nurses in their wards like pieces on a checkerboard.

Sidney went into the operating-room that afternoon. For her blue uniform, kerchief, and cap she exchanged the hideous operating-room garb: long, straight white gown with short sleeves and mob-cap, gray-white from many sterilizations. But the ugly costume seemed to emphasize her beauty, as the habit of a nun often brings out the placid saintliness of her face.

The relationship between Sidney and Max had reached that point that occurs in all relationships between men and women: when things must either go forward or go back, but cannot remain as they are. The condition had existed for the last three months. It exasperated the man.

As a matter of fact, Wilson could not go ahead. The situation with Carlotta had become tense, irritating. He felt that she stood ready to block any move he made. He would not go back, and he dared not go forward.

If Sidney was puzzled, she kept it bravely to herself. In her little room at night, with the door carefully locked, she tried to think things out. There were a few treasures that she looked over regularly: a dried flower from the Christmas roses; a label that he had pasted playfully on the back of her hand one day after the rush of surgical dressings was over and which said “Rx, Take once and forever.”

There was another piece of paper over which Sidney spent much time. It was a page torn out of an order book, and it read: “Sigsbee may have light diet; Rosenfeld massage.” Underneath was written, very small:

“You are the most beautiful person in the world.”

Two reasons had prompted Wilson to request to have Sidney in the operating-room. He wanted her with him, and he wanted her to see him at work: the age-old instinct of the male to have his woman see him at his best.

He was in high spirits that first day of Sidney’s operating-room experience. For the time at least, Carlotta was out of the way. Her somber eyes no longer watched him. Once he looked up from his work and glanced at Sidney where she stood at strained attention.

“Feeling faint?” he said.

She colored under the eyes that were turned on her.

“No, Dr. Wilson.”

“A great many of them faint on the first day. We sometimes have them lying all over the floor.”

He challenged Miss Gregg with his eyes, and she reproved him with a shake of her head, as she might a bad boy.

One way and another, he managed to turn the attention of the operating-room to Sidney several times. It suited his whim, and it did more than that: it gave him a chance to speak to her in his teasing way.

Sidney came through the operation as if she had been through fire—taut as a string, rather pale, but undaunted. But when the last case had been taken out, Max dropped his bantering manner. The internes were looking over instruments; the nurses were busy on the hundred and one tasks of clearing up; so he had a chance for a word with her alone.

“I am proud of you, Sidney; you came through it like a soldier.”

“You made it very hard for me.”

A nurse was coming toward him; he had only a moment.

“I shall leave a note in the mail-box,” he said quickly, and proceeded with the scrubbing of his hands which signified the end of the day’s work.

The operations had lasted until late in the afternoon. The night nurses had taken up their stations; prayers were over. The internes were gathered in the smoking-room, threshing over the day’s work, as was their custom. When Sidney was free, she went to the office for the note. It was very brief:—

I have something I want to say to you, dear. I think you know what it is. I never see you alone at home any more. If you can get off for an hour, won’t you take the trolley to the end of Division Street? I’ll be there with the car at eight-thirty, and I promise to have you back by ten o’clock.

MAX.

The office was empty. No one saw her as she stood by the mail-box. The ticking of the office clock, the heavy rumble of a dray outside, the roll of the ambulance as it went out through the gateway, and in her hand the realization of what she had never confessed as a hope, even to herself! He, the great one, was going to stoop to her. It had been in his eyes that afternoon; it was there, in his letter, now.

It was eight by the office clock. To get out of her uniform and into street clothing, fifteen minutes; on the trolley, another fifteen. She would need to hurry.

But she did not meet him, after all. Miss Wardwell met her in the upper hall.

“Did you get my message?” she asked anxiously.

“What message?”

“Miss Harrison wants to see you. She has been moved to a private room.”

Sidney glanced at K.‘s little watch.

“Must she see me tonight?”

“She has been waiting for hours—ever since you went to the operating-room.”

Sidney sighed, but she went to Carlotta at once. The girl’s condition was puzzling the staff. There was talk of “T.R.”—which is hospital for “typhoid restrictions.” But T.R. has apathy, generally, and Carlotta was not apathetic. Sidney found her tossing restlessly on her high white bed, and put her cool hand over Carlotta’s hot one.

“Did you send for me?”

“Hours ago.” Then, seeing her operating-room uniform: “You’ve been THERE, have you?”

“Is there anything I can do, Carlotta?”

Excitement had dyed Sidney’s cheeks with color and made her eyes luminous. The girl in the bed eyed her, and then abruptly drew her hand away.

“Were you going out?”

“Yes; but not right away.”

“I’ll not keep you if you have an engagement.”

“The engagement will have to wait. I’m sorry you’re ill. If you would like me to stay with you tonight—”

Carlotta shook her head on her pillow.

“Mercy, no!” she said irritably. “I’m only worn out. I need a rest. Are you going home tonight?”

“No,” Sidney admitted, and flushed.

Nothing escaped Carlotta’s eyes—the younger girl’s radiance, her confusion, even her operating room uniform and what it signified. How she hated her, with her youth and freshness, her wide eyes, her soft red lips! And this engagement—she had the uncanny divination of fury.

“I was going to ask you to do something for me,” she said shortly; “but I’ve changed my mind about it. Go on and keep your engagement.”

To end the interview, she turned over and lay with her face to the wall. Sidney stood waiting uncertainly. All her training had been to ignore the irritability of the sick, and Carlotta was very ill; she could see that.

“Just remember that I am ready to do anything I can, Carlotta,” she said. “Nothing will—will be a trouble.”

She waited a moment, but, receiving no acknowledgement of her offer, she turned slowly and went toward the door.

“Sidney!”

She went back to the bed.

“Yes. Don’t sit up, Carlotta. What is it?”

“I’m frightened!”

“You’re feverish and nervous. There’s nothing to be frightened about.”

“If it’s typhoid, I’m gone.”

“That’s childish. Of course you’re not gone, or anything like it. Besides, it’s probably not typhoid.”

“I’m afraid to sleep. I doze for a little, and when I waken there are people in the room. They stand around the bed and talk about me.”

Sidney’s precious minutes were flying; but Carlotta had gone into a paroxysm of terror, holding to Sidney’s hand and begging not to be left alone.

“I’m too young to die,” she would whimper. And in the next breath: “I want to die—I don’t want to live!”

The hands of the little watch pointed to eight-thirty when at last she lay quiet, with closed eyes. Sidney, tiptoeing to the door, was brought up short by her name again, this time in a more normal voice:—

“Sidney.”

“Yes, dear.”

“Perhaps you are right and I’m going to get over this.”

“Certainly you are. Your nerves are playing tricks with you tonight.”

“I’ll tell you now why I sent for you.”

“I’m listening.”

“If—if I get very bad,—you know what I mean,—will you promise to do exactly what I tell you?”

“I promise, absolutely.”

“My trunk key is in my pocket-book. There is a letter in the tray—just a name, no address on it. Promise to see that it is not delivered; that it is destroyed without being read.”

Sidney promised promptly; and, because it was too late now for her meeting with Wilson, for the next hour she devoted herself to making Carlotta comfortable. So long as she was busy, a sort of exaltation of service upheld her. But when at last the night assistant came to sit with the sick girl, and Sidney was free, all the life faded from her face. He had waited for her and she had not come. Would he understand? Would he ask her to meet him again? Perhaps, after all, his question had not been what she had thought.

She went miserably to bed. K.‘s little watch ticked under her pillow. Her stiff cap moved in the breeze as it swung from the corner of her mirror. Under her window passed and repassed the night life of the city—taxicabs, stealthy painted women, tired office-cleaners trudging home at midnight, a city patrol-wagon which rolled in through the gates to the hospital’s always open door. When she could not sleep, she got up and padded to the window in bare feet. The light from a passing machine showed a youthful figure that looked like Joe Drummond.

Life, that had always seemed so simple, was growing very complicated for Sidney: Joe and K., Palmer and Christine, Johnny Rosenfeld, Carlotta—either lonely or tragic, all of them, or both. Life in the raw.

Toward morning Carlotta wakened. The night assistant was still there. It had been a quiet night and she was asleep in her chair. To save her cap she had taken it off, and early streaks of silver showed in her hair.

Carlotta roused her ruthlessly.

“I want something from my trunk,” she said.

The assistant wakened reluctantly, and looked at her watch. Almost morning. She yawned and pinned on her cap.

“For Heaven’s sake,” she protested. “You don’t want me to go to the trunk-room at this hour!”

“I can go myself,” said Carlotta, and put her feet out of bed.

“What is it you want?”

“A letter on the top tray. If I wait my temperature will go up and I can’t think.”

“Shall I mail it for you?”

“Bring it here,” said Carlotta shortly. “I want to destroy it.”

The young woman went without haste, to show that a night assistant may do such things out of friendship, but not because she must. She stopped at the desk where the night nurse in charge of the rooms on that floor was filling out records.

“Give me twelve private patients to look after instead of one nurse like Carlotta Harrison!” she complained. “I’ve got to go to the trunk-room for her at this hour, and it next door to the mortuary!”

As the first rays of the summer sun came through the window, shadowing the fire-escape like a lattice on the wall of the little gray-walled room, Carlotta sat up in her bed and lighted the candle on the stand. The night assistant, who dreamed sometimes of fire, stood nervously by.

“Why don’t you let me do it?” she asked irritably.

Carlotta did not reply at once. The candle was in her hand, and she was staring at the letter.

“Because I want to do it myself,” she said at last, and thrust the envelope into the flame. It burned slowly, at first a thin blue flame tipped with yellow, then, eating its way with a small fine crackling, a widening, destroying blaze that left behind it black ash and destruction. The acrid odor of burning filled the room. Not until it was consumed, and the black ash fell into the saucer of the candlestick, did Carlotta speak again. Then:—

“If every fool of a woman who wrote a letter burnt it, there would be less trouble in the world,” she said, and lay back among her pillows.

The assistant said nothing. She was sleepy and irritated, and she had crushed her best cap by letting the lid of Carlotta’s trunk fall on her. She went out of the room with disapproval in every line of her back.

“She burned it,” she informed the night nurse at her desk. “A letter to a man—one of her suitors, I suppose. The name was K. Le Moyne.”

The deepening and broadening of Sidney’s character had been very noticeable in the last few months. She had gained in decision without becoming hard; had learned to see things as they are, not through the rose mist of early girlhood; and, far from being daunted, had developed a philosophy that had for its basis God in His heaven and all well with the world.

But her new theory of acceptance did not comprehend everything. She was in a state of wild revolt, for instance, as to Johnny Rosenfeld, and more remotely but not less deeply concerned over Grace Irving. Soon she was to learn of Tillie’s predicament, and to take up the cudgels valiantly for her.

But her revolt was to be for herself too. On the day after her failure to keep her appointment with Wilson she had her half-holiday. No word had come from him, and when, after a restless night, she went to her new station in the operating-room, it was to learn that he had been called out of the city in consultation and would not operate that day. O’Hara would take advantage of the free afternoon to run in some odds and ends of cases.

The operating-room made gauze that morning, and small packets of tampons: absorbent cotton covered with sterilized gauze, and fastened together—twelve, by careful count, in each bundle.

Miss Grange, who had been kind to Sidney in her probation months, taught her the method.

“Used instead of sponges,” she explained. “If you noticed yesterday, they were counted before and after each operation. One of these missing is worse than a bank clerk out a dollar at the end of the day. There’s no closing up until it’s found!”

Sidney eyed the small packet before her anxiously.

“What a hideous responsibility!” she said.

From that time on she handled the small gauze sponges almost reverently.

The operating-room—all glass, white enamel, and shining nickel-plate—first frightened, then thrilled her. It was as if, having loved a great actor, she now trod the enchanted boards on which he achieved his triumphs. She was glad that it was her afternoon off, and that she would not see some lesser star—O’Hara, to wit—usurping his place.

But Max had not sent her any word. That hurt. He must have known that she had been delayed.

The operating-room was a hive of industry, and tongues kept pace with fingers. The hospital was a world, like the Street. The nurses had come from many places, and, like cloistered nuns, seemed to have left the other world behind. A new President of the country was less real than a new interne. The country might wash its soiled linen in public; what was that compared with enough sheets and towels for the wards? Big buildings were going up in the city. Ah! but the hospital took cognizance of that, gathering as it did a toll from each new story added. What news of the world came in through the great doors was translated at once into hospital terms. What the city forgot the hospital remembered. It took up life where the town left it at its gates, and carried it on or saw it ended, as the case might be. So these young women knew the ending of many stories, the beginning of some; but of none did they know both the first and last, the beginning and the end.

By many small kindnesses Sidney had made herself popular. And there was more to it than that. She never shirked. The other girls had the respect for her of one honest worker for another. The episode that had caused her suspension seemed entirely forgotten. They showed her carefully what she was to do; and, because she must know the “why” of everything, they explained as best they could.

It was while she was standing by the great sterilizer that she heard, through an open door, part of a conversation that sent her through the day with her world in revolt.

The talkers were putting the anaesthetizing-room in readiness for the afternoon. Sidney, waiting for the time to open the sterilizer, was busy, for the first time in her hurried morning, with her own thoughts. Because she was very human, there was a little exultation in her mind. What would these girls say when they learned of how things stood between her and their hero—that, out of all his world of society and clubs and beautiful women, he was going to choose her?

Not shameful, this: the honest pride of a woman in being chosen from many.

The voices were very clear.

“Typhoid! Of course not. She’s eating her heart out.”

“Do you think he has really broken with her?”

“Probably not. She knows it’s coming; that’s all.”

“Sometimes I have wondered—”

“So have others. She oughtn’t to be here, of course. But among so many there is bound to be one now and then who—who isn’t quite—”

She hesitated, at a loss for a word.

“Did you—did you ever think over that trouble with Miss Page about the medicines? That would have been easy, and like her.”

“She hates Miss Page, of course, but I hardly think—If that’s true, it was nearly murder.”

There were two voices, a young one, full of soft southern inflections, and an older voice, a trifle hard, as from disillusion.

They were working as they talked. Sidney could hear the clatter of bottles on the tray, the scraping of a moved table.

“He was crazy about her last fall.”

“Miss Page?” (The younger voice, with a thrill in it.)

“Carlotta. Of course this is confidential.”

“Surely.”

“I saw her with him in his car one evening. And on her vacation last summer—”

The voices dropped to a whisper. Sidney, standing cold and white by the sterilizer, put out a hand to steady herself. So that was it! No wonder Carlotta had hated her. And those whispering voices! What were they saying? How hateful life was, and men and women. Must there always be something hideous in the background? Until now she had only seen life. Now she felt its hot breath on her cheek.

She was steady enough in a moment, cool and calm, moving about her work with ice-cold hands and slightly narrowed eyes. To a sort of physical nausea was succeeding anger, a blind fury of injured pride. He had been in love with Carlotta and had tired of her. He was bringing her his warmed-over emotions. She remembered the bitterness of her month’s exile, and its probable cause. Max had stood by her then. Well he might, if he suspected the truth.

For just a moment she had an illuminating flash of Wilson as he really was, selfish and self-indulgent, just a trifle too carefully dressed, daring as to eye and speech, with a carefully calculated daring, frankly pleasure-loving. She put her hands over her eyes.

The voices in the next room had risen above their whisper.

“Genius has privileges, of course,” said the older voice. “He is a very great surgeon. Tomorrow he is to do the Edwardes operation again. I am glad I am to see him do it.”

Sidney still held her hands over her eyes. He WAS a great surgeon: in his hands he held the keys of life and death. And perhaps he had never cared for Carlotta: she might have thrown herself at him. He was a man, at the mercy of any scheming woman.

She tried to summon his image to her aid. But a curious thing happened. She could not visualize him. Instead, there came, clear and distinct, a picture of K. Le Moyne in the hall of the little house, reaching one of his long arms to the chandelier over his head and looking up at her as she stood on the stairs.

CHAPTER XXII

“My God, Sidney, I’m asking you to marry me!”

“I—I know that. I am asking you something else, Max.”

“I have never been in love with her.”

His voice was sulky. He had drawn the car close to a bank, and they were sitting in the shade, on the grass. It was the Sunday afternoon after Sidney’s experience in the operating-room.

“You took her out, Max, didn’t you?”

“A few times, yes. She seemed to have no friends. I was sorry for her.”

“That was all?”

“Absolutely. Good Heavens, you’ve put me through a catechism in the last ten minutes!”

“If my father were living, or even mother, I—one of them would have done this for me, Max. I’m sorry I had to. I’ve been very wretched for several days.”

It was the first encouragement she had given him. There was no coquetry about her aloofness. It was only that her faith in him had had a shock and was slow of reviving.

“You are very, very lovely, Sidney. I wonder if you have any idea what you mean to me?”

“You meant a great deal to me, too,” she said frankly, “until a few days ago. I thought you were the greatest man I had ever known, and the best. And then—I think I’d better tell you what I overheard. I didn’t try to hear. It just happened that way.”

He listened doggedly to her account of the hospital gossip, doggedly and with a sinking sense of fear, not of the talk, but of Carlotta herself. Usually one might count on the woman’s silence, her instinct for self-protection. But Carlotta was different. Damn the girl, anyhow! She had known from the start that the affair was a temporary one; he had never pretended anything else.

There was silence for a moment after Sidney finished. Then:

“You are not a child any longer, Sidney. You have learned a great deal in this last year. One of the things you know is that almost every man has small affairs, many of them sometimes, before he finds the woman he wants to marry. When he finds her, the others are all off—there’s nothing to them. It’s the real thing then, instead of the sham.”

“Palmer was very much in love with Christine, and yet—”

“Palmer is a cad.”

“I don’t want you to think I’m making terms. I’m not. But if this thing went on, and I found out afterward that you—that there was anyone else, it would kill me.”

“Then you care, after all!”

There was something boyish in his triumph, in the very gesture with which he held out his arms, like a child who has escaped a whipping. He stood up and, catching her hands, drew her to her feet. “You love me, dear.”

“I’m afraid I do, Max.”

“Then I’m yours, and only yours, if you want me,” he said, and took her in his arms.

He was riotously happy, must hold her off for the joy of drawing her to him again, must pull off her gloves and kiss her soft bare palms.

“I love you, love you!” he cried, and bent down to bury his face in the warm hollow of her neck.

Sidney glowed under his caresses—was rather startled at his passion, a little ashamed.

“Tell me you love me a little bit. Say it.”

“I love you,” said Sidney, and flushed scarlet.

But even in his arms, with the warm sunlight on his radiant face, with his lips to her ear, whispering the divine absurdities of passion, in the back of her obstinate little head was the thought that, while she had given him her first embrace, he had held other women in his arms. It made her passive, prevented her complete surrender.

And after a time he resented it. “You are only letting me love you,” he complained. “I don’t believe you care, after all.”

He freed her, took a step back from her.

“I am afraid I am jealous,” she said simply. “I keep thinking of—of Carlotta.”

“Will it help any if I swear that that is off absolutely?”

“Don’t be absurd. It is enough to have you say so.”

But he insisted on swearing, standing with one hand upraised, his eyes on her. The Sunday landscape was very still, save for the hum of busy insect life. A mile or so away, at the foot of two hills, lay a white farmhouse with its barn and outbuildings. In a small room in the barn a woman sat; and because it was Sunday, and she could not sew, she read her Bible.

“—and that after this there will be only one woman for me,” finished Max, and dropped his hand. He bent over and kissed Sidney on the lips.

At the white farmhouse, a little man stood in the doorway and surveyed the road with eyes shaded by a shirt-sleeved arm. Behind him, in a darkened room, a barkeeper was wiping the bar with a clean cloth.

“I guess I’ll go and get my coat on, Bill,” said the little man heavily. “They’re starting to come now. I see a machine about a mile down the road.”

Sidney broke the news of her engagement to K. herself, the evening of the same day. The little house was quiet when she got out of the car at the door. Harriet was asleep on the couch at the foot of her bed, and Christine’s rooms were empty. She found Katie on the back porch, mountains of Sunday newspapers piled around her.

“I’d about give you up,” said Katie. “I was thinking, rather than see your ice-cream that’s left from dinner melt and go to waste, I’d take it around to the Rosenfelds.”

“Please take it to them. I’d really rather they had it.”

She stood in front of Katie, drawing off her gloves.

“Aunt Harriet’s asleep. Is—is Mr. Le Moyne around?”

“You’re gettin’ prettier every day, Miss Sidney. Is that the blue suit Miss Harriet said she made for you? It’s right stylish. I’d like to see the back.”

Sidney obediently turned, and Katie admired.

“When I think how things have turned out!” she reflected. “You in a hospital, doing God knows what for all sorts of people, and Miss Harriet making a suit like that and asking a hundred dollars for it, and that tony that a person doesn’t dare to speak to her when she’s in the dining-room. And your poor ma…well, it’s all in a lifetime! No; Mr. K.‘s not here. He and Mrs. Howe are gallivanting around together.”

“Katie!”

“Well, that’s what I call it. I’m not blind. Don’t I hear her dressing up about four o’clock every afternoon, and, when she’s all ready, sittin’ in the parlor with the door open, and a book on her knee, as if she’d been reading all afternoon? If he doesn’t stop, she’s at the foot of the stairs, calling up to him. ‘K.,’ she says, ‘K., I’m waiting to ask you something!’ or, ‘K., wouldn’t you like a cup of tea?’ She’s always feedin’ him tea and cake, so that when he comes to table he won’t eat honest victuals.”

Sidney had paused with one glove half off. Katie’s tone carried conviction. Was life making another of its queer errors, and were Christine and K. in love with each other? K. had always been HER friend, HER confidant. To give him up to Christine—she shook herself impatiently. What had come over her? Why not be glad that he had some sort of companionship?

She went upstairs to the room that had been her mother’s, and took off her hat. She wanted to be alone, to realize what had happened to her. She did not belong to herself any more. It gave her an odd, lost feeling. She was going to be married—not very soon, but ultimately. A year ago her half promise to Joe had gratified her sense of romance. She was loved, and she had thrilled to it.

But this was different. Marriage, that had been but a vision then, loomed large, almost menacing. She had learned the law of compensation: that for every joy one pays in suffering. Women who married went down into the valley of death for their children. One must love and be loved very tenderly to pay for that. The scale must balance.

And there were other things. Women grew old, and age was not always lovely. This very maternity—was it not fatal to beauty? Visions of child-bearing women in the hospitals, with sagging breasts and relaxed bodies, came to her. That was a part of the price.

Harriet was stirring, across the hall. Sidney could hear her moving about with flat, inelastic steps.

That was the alternative. One married, happily or not as the case might be, and took the risk. Or one stayed single, like Harriet, growing a little hard, exchanging slimness for leanness and austerity of figure, flat-chested, thin-voiced. One blossomed and withered, then, or one shriveled up without having flowered. All at once it seemed very terrible to her. She felt as if she had been caught in an inexorable hand that had closed about her.

Harriet found her a little later, face down on her mother’s bed, crying as if her heart would break. She scolded her roundly.

“You’ve been overworking,” she said. “You’ve been getting thinner. Your measurements for that suit showed it. I have never approved of this hospital training, and after last January—”

She could hardly credit her senses when Sidney, still swollen with weeping, told her of her engagement.

“But I don’t understand. If you care for him and he has asked you to marry him, why on earth are you crying your eyes out?”

“I do care. I don’t know why I cried. It just came over me, all at once, that I—It was just foolishness. I am very happy, Aunt Harriet.”

Harriet thought she understood. The girl needed her mother, and she, Harriet, was a hard, middle-aged woman and a poor substitute. She patted Sidney’s moist hand.

“I guess I understand,” she said. “I’ll attend to your wedding things, Sidney. We’ll show this street that even Christine Lorenz can be outdone.” And, as an afterthought: “I hope Max Wilson will settle down now. He’s been none too steady.”

K. had taken Christine to see Tillie that Sunday afternoon. Palmer had the car out—had, indeed, not been home since the morning of the previous day. He played golf every Saturday afternoon and Sunday at the Country Club, and invariably spent the night there. So K. and Christine walked from the end of the trolley line, saying little, but under K.‘s keen direction finding bright birds in the hedgerows, hidden field flowers, a dozen wonders of the country that Christine had never dreamed of.

The interview with Tillie had been a disappointment to K. Christine, with the best and kindliest intentions, struck a wrong note. In her endeavor to cover the fact that everything in Tillie’s world was wrong, she fell into the error of pretending that everything was right.

Tillie, grotesque of figure and tragic-eyed, listened to her patiently, while K. stood, uneasy and uncomfortable, in the wide door of the hay-barn and watched automobiles turning in from the road. When Christine rose to leave, she confessed her failure frankly.

“I’ve meant well, Tillie,” she said. “I’m afraid I’ve said exactly what I shouldn’t. I can only think that, no matter what is wrong, two wonderful pieces of luck have come to you. Your husband—that is, Mr. Schwitter—cares for you,—you admit that,—and you are going to have a child.”

Tillie’s pale eyes filled.

“I used to be a good woman, Mrs. Howe,” she said simply. “Now I’m not. When I look in that glass at myself, and call myself what I am, I’d give a good bit to be back on the Street again.”

She found opportunity for a word with K. while Christine went ahead of him out of the barn.

“I’ve been wanting to speak to you, Mr. Le Moyne.” She lowered her voice. “Joe Drummond’s been coming out here pretty regular. Schwitter says he’s drinking a little. He don’t like him loafing around here: he sent him home last Sunday. What’s come over the boy?”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“The barkeeper says he carries a revolver around, and talks wild. I thought maybe Sidney Page could do something with him.”

“I think he’d not like her to know. I’ll do what I can.”

K.‘s face was thoughtful as he followed Christine to the road.

Christine was very silent, on the way back to the city. More than once K. found her eyes fixed on him, and it puzzled him. Poor Christine was only trying to fit him into the world she knew—a world whose men were strong but seldom tender, who gave up their Sundays to golf, not to visiting unhappy outcasts in the country. How masculine he was, and yet how gentle! It gave her a choking feeling in her throat. She took advantage of a steep bit of road to stop and stand a moment, her fingers on his shabby gray sleeve.

It was late when they got home. Sidney was sitting on the low step, waiting for them.

Wilson had come across at seven, impatient because he must see a case that evening, and promising an early return. In the little hall he had drawn her to him and kissed her, this time not on the lips, but on the forehead and on each of her white eyelids.

“Little wife-to-be!” he had said, and was rather ashamed of his own emotion. From across the Street, as he got into his car, he had waved his hand to her.

Christine went to her room, and, with a long breath of content, K. folded up his long length on the step below Sidney.

“Well, dear ministering angel,” he said, “how goes the world?”

“Things have been happening, K.”

He sat erect and looked at her. Perhaps because she had a woman’s instinct for making the most of a piece of news, perhaps—more likely, indeed—because she divined that the announcement would not be entirely agreeable, she delayed it, played with it.

“I have gone into the operating-room.”

“Fine!”

“The costume is ugly. I look hideous in it.”

“Doubtless.”

He smiled up at her. There was relief in his eyes, and still a question.

“Is that all the news?”

“There is something else, K.”

It was a moment before he spoke. He sat looking ahead, his face set. Apparently he did not wish to hear her say it; for when, after a moment, he spoke, it was to forestall her, after all.

“I think I know what it is, Sidney.”

“You expected it, didn’t you?”

“I—it’s not an entire surprise.”

“Aren’t you going to wish me happiness?”

“If my wishing could bring anything good to you, you would have everything in the world.”

His voice was not entirely steady, but his eyes smiled into hers.

“Am I—are we going to lose you soon?”

“I shall finish my training. I made that a condition.”

Then, in a burst of confidence:—

“I know so little, K., and he knows so much! I am going to read and study, so that he can talk to me about his work. That’s what marriage ought to be, a sort of partnership. Don’t you think so?”

K. nodded. His mind refused to go forward to the unthinkable future. Instead, he was looking back—back to those days when he had hoped sometime to have a wife to talk to about his work, that beloved work that was no longer his. And, finding it agonizing, as indeed all thought was that summer night, he dwelt for a moment on that evening, a year before, when in the same June moonlight, he had come up the Street and had seen Sidney where she was now, with the tree shadows playing over her.