w; somebody'll be cuttin' loose pretty soon and
you'll get your turn all right."

She made to move on, but paused again to answer.

"The room will always be there if you if anybody wants it," she said.
"Even if nobody ever comes, it shall always be ready, at least.
That's all I can do."

She bade him farewell, with the little nod she had, and passed on,
muffling her chin down into her great cloth collar. Waters looked
after her with a frown of consideration. He was forgetting for the
moment that he was cold, that he had fed inadequately upon gruel of
barley, that he was all but penniless in an expensive and hostile
world. There was astir in his being, as he watched the slight
overcoated figure of the girl, that same protective instinct which
had galvanized even Selby into generosity; it never fails to make one
feel man enough to cope with any array of ills. There crossed and
tangled in his mind a moving web of schemes for aiding and consoling
her.

Each of them had for a character vagueness of method and utter
completeness of result, but none amounted to a programme. Waters, for
all his brisk record, was not a man of action; he was rather a
mechanism jolted abruptly into action by the impulses of a detached
and ardent mind. It was chance, the ironic chance whose marionettes
are men and women, and not any design of his, which turned his feet
that evening towards the room that was always to be waiting and
ready.

He was returning towards his lodging after an afternoon of looking
for work, tired, wearing a humor in tune with the early dark and the
empty monotony of the streets by which he went. The few folk who were
abroad in them went by like shy ghosts; the high fronts of the houses
were like barricades between him and all the comfort and security in
the world. There was mud in the roads and his boots were no longer
weather-proof. Life tasted stale and sour.

An empty droschky, going the same way as himself, came bumping along
the gutter behind him, the driver singing hoarse and broken snatches
of song. He moved from the edge of the pavement to be clear of
mud-splashes as it passed him, and heard, without further concern,
the vehicle draw up level with him and the whistle and slap of the
whip as the istvostchik light-heartedly tortured his feeble horse.

"Her eyes are cornflowers," proclaimed the istvostchik melodiously;
"her lips are-" He was abreast of Waters as he broke off. Five feet
of uneven and slimy sid