and had thought these faces commonplace. But now at the end it was
not so.

A woman with a baby carriage stopped directly in front of him and stood
there anxiously watching for a chance to cross the street. And Roger
thought of Deborah. Heavily he climbed down from his seat, paid the man and
bade him good-night, and went home to see Deborah's baby.

For a long time he sat by the cradle. Presently Deborah joined him, and
soon they were laughing heartily at the astonishing jerks and kicks and
grimaces of the tiny boy. He was having his bath and he hated it. But safe
at last on his mother's lap, wrapped to his ears in a big soft towel, he
grew very gay and contented and looked waggishly about.

There followed long lazy days of spring, as April drifted into May. Early
in the morning Roger could hear through his window the cries of the vendors
of flowers and fruits. And he listened drowsily. He rose late and spent
most of the day in the house; but occasionally he went out for a stroll.
And one balmy evening when groups of youths came trooping by, singing in
close harmony, Roger called a taxi and went far down through the tenement
streets to a favorite haunt of his, a little Syrian pawnshop, where after
long delving he purchased a ring to put in the new collection that he had
been making lately. He had nearly a dozen now.

Days passed. The house was still so quiet, Deborah was still upstairs. At
last, one night upon leaving his study, he stopped uncertainly in the hall.
He took more time than was his wont in closing up the house for the night,
in trying all the windows, in turning out the various lights. Room after
room he left in the dark. Then he went slowly up the stairs, his hand
gratefully feeling those guiding points grown so familiar to his touch
through many thousand evenings. His hand lingered on the banister and he
stopped again to listen there.

He did not come downstairs again.

He was able to sleep but little at night. Turning restlessly on his bed, he
would glance out of the window up at the beetling wall close by, tier on
tier of apartments from which faint voices dropped out of the dark.
Gradually as the night wore on, these voices would all die away into long
mysterious silences--for to him at least such silences had grown to be
very mysterious. Alone in the hours that followed, even these modern
neighbors and this strange new eager town pressing down upon his house
seemed no longer strange to him nor s