ues clanged cars black with mechanics,
clerks, and shop-girls on the way to work; people streamed hurrying to
their day's toil. The city was awake, shaking in every part of her with
glad breakfast and the rush to activity. What colossal forces swinging
in, swinging out of the metropolis in long pulsations of freight and
ship and electricity! Wall Street would roar, the skyscrapers swarm, the
schools drone and murmur and sing, the mills grind and rattle, and the
six continents and the seven seas would pulse their blood into the city
and be flushed by her radiating tides. Into this hidden activity Myra
stepped, deaf and blind to all but the clamor of her heart and a single
man walking like a black pawn aureoled in the low early sunlight.

She came down slowly, as he came up. She glanced at his face. She was
shocked by its suffering, its gray age. He looked quite shabby in his
long frayed coat, his unpolished shoes, his gray slouch hat--shabby and
homely, and ill-proportioned, stooping a little, his rough shock of hair
framing the furrowed face and sunken melancholy eyes. And it was for
this man that she had been breaking her heart! Yet, at the moment there
swept over her an awful surge of passion, so strong that she could have
seized him in her arms and died in his embrace.

He, in turn, saw how white and set her face was, how condemnatory. He
had come to her almost ready to throw his plans overboard and cleave to
her--for a day and a night that side of his nature had dominated,
expunging all else, driving him to her, demanding that he grasp her
magic presence, her womanly splendor. This alone was real, and all the
rest fantastic. And he had walked up and down the street with all the
October morning singing in his blood; the world was glorious again and
he was young; he would take her, he would forget all else, and they
would go off somewhere in the wilderness and really live. He had never
lived yet. He thirsted for life, he thirsted for all this woman could
give him. And now the condemnation in her face choked him off, made her
a stranger, separated them, made it hard to speak to her.

He cried in a low voice:

"Myra!"

The word was charged with genuine passion, and she became more pale, and
stood unable to find her tongue, her lips quivering painfully.

Then suddenly there was a nervous overflow.

"You wanted to walk in the Park," she blurted in a cold, uneven voice.
"We'd better be going then. I won't have much