tired-body and soul!' Suddenly she looked up at him, and pointing to the picture, that to-day had no curtain drawn, said:

"Do you think I'm like her? I made Oliver tell me about myself this summer. That's why you needn't bother. It doesn't matter what happens to me, you see. And I don't care because you can love me without feeling bad about it; and you will, won't you?"

Then, with her eyes still on his face, she went on quickly: "Only we won't talk about that now, will we? It's too cosey. I am nice and tired. Do smoke!"

But Lennan's fingers trembled so that he could hardly light his cigarette. And, watching them, she said: "Please give me one, Dad doesn't like my smoking." The virtue of Johnny Dromore! Yes! It would always be by proxy!

She clapped her hands, and the kitten. crawled down to her knees.

When he got up to go, she did not move, but just looked up at him; and how he got away he did not know.

Stopping his cab a little short of home, he ran, for he felt cold and stiff, and, letting himself in with his latch-key, went straight to the drawing-room. The door was ajar, and Sylvia standing at the window. He heard her sigh; and his heart smote him. Very still, and slender, and lonely she looked out there, with the light shining on her fair hair, so that it seemed almost white. Then she turned, and saw him. He noticed her throat working with the effort she made not to show him anything, and he said:

"Are you very fond of him, Nell?" "Yes."

"I don't care."

And once more Lennan thought: God help me!

Then, peering up through the kitten's fur, she said softly:

"Oliver wants me to go to a dance on Saturday-it's for a charity. Shall I?" "Of course; why not?" "Will you come?" "I?"

"Oh, do! You must. It's my very first, you know. I've got an extra ticket." And against his will, his judgmenteverything, Lennan answered: "Yes."

false.

She only answered: "It's all right, dear," but he saw that she kept her eyes -those blue, too true eyes-averted, even when she kissed him.

And so began another evening and night and morning of fever, subterfuge, weariness, aching. A round of halfecstatic torment, out of which he could no more break than a man can break through the walls of a cell.

Though it live but a day in the sun, though it drown in tenebrous night, the dark flower of passion will have its hour. . .

VEN on this last day before slinking away into the dim limbo of unwanted and forgotten newspaper men he was punctual. As he came up out of the subway station with a noon edition of an afternoon newspaper in his hand he noticed that it lacked five minutes of twelve. He rode up to the sixteenth floor of the Chronicle building and walked into the long, clean editorial room. As he laid his overcoat and cane on the desk in front of him the hands of the clock came together, as if in a handshake of congratulation; dear old Walter was preserving one journalistic virtue until the end.

Before he had sat down two rival office boys rushed at him with fresh Chronicles, that he might clip out his yesterday's space. He took both papers and smiled and said thank you, and they backed away, abashed, fearful lest the affectionate haste of this voluntary service to Mr. Hamlin might have exposed emotion, of which, being men in the making, they were ashamed.

All about him reporters were cutting out great slithers of space, at seven dollars a column, and calculating noisily how much they had made on Tuesday. Opening one of his papers, the gray-haired, boy-faced reporter searched through it; he found his little story of the day before hidden in a corner of the routine page between "Yesterday's Fires" and "Bankrupt Notices."

Its accidental position, the result, he was veteran enough to know, of the makeup man's filling up an unexpected hole with anything unimportant that came to hand, struck him as peculiarly appropriate to his case; and he sat staring at his story with a wry smile. Two weeks before the suspicion had got through to a sober part of his mind that his presence on the Chronicle was embarrassing to the

VOL. LIV.-47

city and managing editors, and that they were too tenderly loyal to discharge him because they had all three been cubs together some fifteen years before; so he had resigned at once, giving the usual notice.

It had not been hard for him, meanwhile, to arrange for an exit into the obscure regions of press agency, that hell of prideful newspaper men. He was glad that the job was to carry him to the Pacific coast, into new surroundings. There was an unspoken compact among the three men that he was to drop silently out of the ranks, thus escaping the inevitable cruel questions of his kindly brother reporters.

In the sobriety brought by the first shock to his pride he had gone, one morning after the paper had been put to press, to the huge, dusty cabinets at the end of the deserted office containing the local copy for several years past, that he might look back at himself through his stories. He read page after page where he had omitted important words, run words together, left yawning gaps between sentence and sentence, paragraph and paragraph: hideous gibberish until the loyal hands of night city editor and copyreaders had toiled to make it into sense. Here and there he had found a story bearing his name which had obviously been rewritten on a machine other than his own, and in which he had recognized the mannerisms of this and that reporter, some of them cubs.

So he had been forced to know that not only the day city editor and the managing editor, but also the night city editor, the copy-readers, the very youngest cub had all stood on guard about him, shielding him from the impatient high executives, insuring him a living space bill at the end of each week, saying nothing to him, and thus trying to save even his self-respect. The scrubwoman, coming in at 4 A. M.,

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had discovered him sitting brokenly at a desk with his head lying on a litter of his crazy old stories; asleep, so he had told her, and had put away the copy and walked with great dignity out of the door. As he stared at his latest story sandwiched between "Yesterday's Fires" and "Bankrupt Notices" he thought of that scene, and hated to think of it. He was glad that the big city editor's cheerful, booming voice now began calling from the boxed-in southeast corner behind him, calling first to his most reliable and highly paid men, then to the varying degrees of cubs. One by one they hurried into the office to receive instructions, and Walter tried to guess what stories they would have in the next day's paper. The noon edition he had read on the subway train had given him a general idea of the run of news. In his summaries there kept recurring in his mind with painful, envious insistence the thought: "Maybe he will get on the front page in the morning." He twisted nervously at the corner of his paper, his ears straining on from name to name, listening for one he did not hear.

The voice from the southeast corner behind him stopped calling out names. Among the chaffering reporters, as they looked up addresses, supplied themselves with copy paper, and got ready to start out on their stories, there was a confident, joyous camaraderie from which he felt excluded. Singly and in groups they disappeared through the glazed door.

Mr. Gray, the city editor, having laid the framework of his next day's paper, hurried out for a quick lunch. The assistant city editor was laboriously searching through the latest inundation of afternoon editions for stories they had found but had not had time enough to get the good out of. The office boys were stealthily playing cards in the far end of the long room. The three or four very young cubs left were ploughing through the aged classics, cultivating their styles, they reassuringly told themselves. The great room lay empty and forlorn.

Walter got up and strolled over to one of the windows looking down on Broadway. It was matinée day, and along the little lane flowed double streams of women's hats, multitudinous dots of moving color that hid the gray sidewalks. Thank

the Lord, he had no wife, nor any dependent women folk; they would be in for hard times now.

The city editor came back presently and sat down. Walter said to himself that if he walked about in the neighborhood of the always open door and engaged the god in conversation maybe he would remember what day this was. But that was a cheap trick and he shoved it instantly aside. Returning to his desk, he dropped into a chair, leaned his head on the back of it, and gazed up at the stainblotched white plaster ceiling.

But he could not sit still. Merely for the sake of movement he got up again and patrolled the aisle by the Broadway windows, looking down at the dear little, bent, human street that he would never see again. After a while the assistant city editor came softly up behind him and handed him a clipping from an afternoon paper.

"Mr. Gray thinks a nice funny story may come out of this," he said. "And it might be a big story. Rosey the Blackhander!" He laughed nervously, placatingly, pityingly.

In the subway, going down to police headquarters, Walter read the small clipping carefully. A regulation Black-hand letter had demanded that an upper Second Avenue baker place $20 on the sidewalk in front of his shop; penalty for failure to comply or for telling the police, death and destruction for his whole family. The German baker had rushed to the police; and at the appointed time a package containing a marked dollar bill had been placed on the sidewalk, partly hidden under a flour barrel as directed, while two detectives watched from across the deserted street. At 11.30 o'clock the night before Max Rosenbaum had been arrested picking it up. In the Harlem Police Court he had said that he lived at 437 East Eighty-second Street with his mother. He was now in the court prison, held for the next higher tribunal.

At headquarters the two detectives, anxious to get their names in the paper as much as possible, eagerly corroborated all that was in the clipping. It appeared to Walter, coming down the steps, that there was nothing to do except to go back to the office and try to make a burlesque

tion, he rode up to Eighty-second Street. Number 437 was over near the East River. Walter climbed the four flights of damp, slick stairs, and was invited into a rear kitchen, which is also the tenement's parlor and drawing-room. A tall, dingy, tired young woman was making a smoky coal fire in a cooking-stove. A tense, clean, dark-faced little German woman was frankly changing a skirt that was wet for one that was dry; she had been out doing by-the-day washing, she explained. A baby lay in a cradle in one corner, patiently blinking his eyes because the smoke hurt.

"I came to talk about your son Max," said Walter tentatively, sitting down in a chair indicated by the old woman.

"Maybe the gentleman come from the hospital," she ventured encouragingly, as she bustled about in the thickly cluttered kitchen. "You tell him about your brother, Minnie; I have not much English. Max, he is a fine boy, but he did have much bad luck dis year. Minnie has good English."

She took up the work at the stove, and the daughter, sitting down by the cradle, began talking in a weary, dim voice occasionally lit with a flash of feeling.

"Three years ago Max got a job in King's iron-yard up on the Harlem River. Then he married the Slav girl down in Seventieth Street, which I will say Natalka is a nice, sweet little thing. At first they boarded with her people, but when the baby came they rented two rooms three doors away an' started in for theirselves right. Natalka is the craziest thing about Max an' the baby.

"Just before last Christmas a piece of iron fell on Max's left hand. At the hospital he stayed six weeks, for the doctors said they wanted to try to save it, which I will say was very good of them. But they didn't. There was trouble with the blood, so they cut off the whole arm in the end. An' he came home very weak. He certainly did look funny.

"Long before that, though, Natalka had given up the two rooms, not able to pay the weekly rents, an' sold the furniture what there was of it-an' gone to live with her people. But they have only three rooms theirselves, an' two younger children besides; an' up here we have only

three with my husband-he's a truck driver, you know-an' two children an' my mother; so neither family could take in another whole family. Natalka stayed with her people, an' Max said he'd stay up here, for a while, till he could look around. Natalka cried about breakin' up, an' my husband said she was foolish; but men, they don't know, they don't know."

She ran both hands back over her face and hair, and then held them for a while. over her eyes.

"Well," she went on in a dry, tired voice, "Natalka said she was goin' to get a job pastin' gold bands on cigars in the factory at First Avenue an' Sixtieth Street, where her father works, but her mother said not to because she couldn't 'tend to her own children right, much less a little baby too. So Max said he would go down there every day an' 'tend to all the children same as a woman, till he could get a job. He thought he could be a night watchman, his eyes bein' good anyhow, when he got all right againwhen he stopped bein' weak an' puny, I mean, you know.

"An' it wasn't long before Natalka got to be a swift bander, the pay bein' by the thousand pasted on, an' she said pretty soon they would be fixed up in two rooms by theirselves again. An' then one night about two weeks ago Max found a fivedollar bill on Second Avenue coming home late, because he always stays down at Natalka's an' talks as long as he can; they are certainly nutty about each other yet. Well, sir, Natalka liked to have had a fit about that, an' ever since Max goes along with his eyes on the ground, grabbin' up everything he sees. But he hasn't found anything more.

"He did not come home last night, so I guess Natalka's people let him sleep there for a change. Max has the promise of a night-watching job next month, an' we think it is all right for them now. The way things are lookin' they are goin' to be very happy again soon. A gentleman was here once before from the hospital to ask about him."

The tall young woman smoothed the covering over the baby and went to the stove to help her mother. Walter got up, walked over to the rear kitchen window,