ad
never done before--I compared her with another woman, with Miss Tucker,
whose piano had so often disturbed my evening labors. Miss Tucker
taught mathematics in an uptown girls' school. She was not as pretty
as Gladys Todd, but I remembered how wonderfully neat she was, with
never a hair blowing loose, and I remembered too that, though she had
disturbed me with her music, I never complained of it, for the sake of
the picture which she made every morning when she descended the stoop
beneath my window, going to her work as cheerfully and daintily as many
of her sisters would to a dinner or a dance.

"We shall only have a hundred dollars left for doctor's bills and
car-fare then, David," said Gladys Todd, looking up from the paper.
There were tears in her eyes, but they did not affect me as much as her
way of doing her hair. How I longed for the courage to tell her that
it was decidedly bad form!

"But we shall only have to wait a little longer, Gladys," said I, and I
moved my chair beside her chair.

"I know," she returned more bravely, putting her hand in mine. "But
you don't realize how lonely I am without you. I want to be with you,
helping you--to be at your side comforting you when you are tired,
cheering you when you are discouraged."

For that moment I forgot the stray wisps and the Langtry knot.

"But it is only a little while longer," I pleaded. "Let us say in
June. I shall come for you in June. You will wait for me till June?"

Her hand was on my shoulder, and I forgot all about Miss Tucker. For
that moment I was the happiest of men.

"Wait for you till June?" she cried. "Why, David, I'd wait for you to
eternity."

"You need not," I replied, laughing. "In June I am coming to take you
to a little house on a green hill, with a veranda where we can sit on
my holidays, you painting tulips on black plaques, and I--well, I with
you, just thinking how wonderful it all is and----"

"How wonderful it will be in June!" said Gladys Todd.

CHAPTER XIV

Fifth Avenue was in those days a favorite resort of mine. Every
morning I plunged into the rush downtown I dived from the elevated
railway station into the tatterdemalion life of Park Row, and when I
raised my head above that ragged human maelstrom and climbed to the
editorial room of _The Record_ it seemed as though I lifted my body out
of a little muddy stream and plunged my mind into a Charybdis which
embraced the whole world. Its centre