rched the crowd and the half-darkness beyond. She
imagined that every approaching tall man was her lover. With the
frankness to which she had been bred she made no concealment of her
heart-sick anxiety.

"He may have to be at the theater," said Sophie, herself extremely
uneasy. Partly through shrewdness, partly through her natural suspicion
of strangers, she felt that Mr. Feuerstein, upon whom she was building,
was not a rock.

"No," replied Hilda. "He told me he wouldn't be at the theater, but
would surely come here." The fact that her lover had said so settled
it to her mind.

They did not leave the Square until ten o'clock, when it was almost
deserted and most of its throngs of an hour before were in bed sleeping
soundly in the content that comes from a life of labor. And when she
did get to bed she lay awake for nearly an hour, tired though she was.
Without doubt some misfortune had befallen him--"He's been hurt or is
ill," she decided. The next morning she stood in the door of the shop
watching for the postman on his first round; as he turned the corner of
Second Street, she could not restrain herself, but ran to meet him.

"Any letter for me?" she inquired in a voice that compelled him to feel
personal guilt in having to say "No."

It was a day of mistakes in weights and in making up packages, a day of
vain searching for some comforting explanation of Mr. Feuerstein's
failure and silence. After supper Sophie came and they went to the
Square, keeping to the center of it where the lights were brightest and
the people fewest.

"I'm sure something's happened," said Sophie. "Maybe Otto has told him
a story--or has--"

"No--not Otto." Hilda dismissed the suggestion as impossible. She had
known Otto too long and too well to entertain for an instant the idea
that he could be underhanded. "There's only one reason--he's sick,
very sick--too sick to send word."

"Let's go and see," said Sophie, as if she had not planned it hours
before.

Hilda hesitated. "It might look as if I--" She did not finish.

"But you needn't show yourself," replied Sophie. "You can wait down
the street and I'll go up to the door and won't give my name."

Hilda clasped her arm more tightly about Sophie's waist and they set
out. They walked more and more swiftly until toward the last they were
almost running. At the corner of Fifteenth Street and First Avenue
Hilda stopped. "I'll go through to Stuyvesant Square," she said