ised into vivid life all these
sombre piles of office buildings. It was dreadful, this labour through
the night. It had all the significance of field hospitals after the
battle--hospitals and the tents of commanding generals. The wounds of
the day were being bound up, the dead were being counted, while, shut
in their headquarters, the captains and the commanders drew the plans
for the grapple of armies that was to recommence with daylight.

"Yes, yes, that's just what it is," continued Page. "See, there's the
Rookery, and there's the Constable Building, where Mr. Helmick has his
offices. Landry showed me it all one day. And, look back." She raised
the flap that covered the little window at the back of the carriage.
"See, down there, at the end of the street. There's the Board of Trade
Building, where the grain speculating is done,--where the wheat pits
and corn pits are."

Laura turned and looked back. On either side of the vista in converging
lines stretched the blazing office buildings. But over the end of the
street the lead-coloured sky was rifted a little. A long, faint bar of
light stretched across the prospect, and silhouetted against this rose
a sombre mass, unbroken by any lights, rearing a black and formidable
facade against the blur of light behind it.

And this was her last impression of the evening. The lighted office
buildings, the murk of rain, the haze of light in the heavens, and
raised against it the pile of the Board of Trade Building, black,
grave, monolithic, crouching on its foundations, like a monstrous
sphinx with blind eyes, silent, grave,--crouching there without a
sound, without sign of life under the night and the drifting veil of
rain.

II

Laura Dearborn's native town was Barrington, in Worcester County,
Massachusetts. Both she and Page had been born there, and there had
lived until the death of their father, at a time when Page was ready
for the High School. The mother, a North Carolina girl, had died long
before.

Laura's education had been unusual. After leaving the High School her
father had for four years allowed her a private tutor (an impecunious
graduate from the Harvard Theological School). She was ambitious, a
devoted student, and her instructor's task was rather to guide than to
enforce her application. She soon acquired a reading knowledge of
French, and knew her Racine in the original almost as well as her
Shakespeare. Literature became for her an actual passion