appy New Year," she cried pleasantly as she went out.

Trina put the dollar away in her trunk before she did anything else and
cooked herself a bit of supper. Then she came downstairs again.

The kindergarten was not large. On the lower floor were but two rooms,
the main schoolroom and another room, a cloakroom, very small, where the
children hung their hats and coats. This cloakroom opened off the back
of the main schoolroom. Trina cast a critical glance into both of these
rooms. There had been a great deal of going and coming in them during
the day, and she decided that the first thing to do would be to scrub
the floors. She went up again to her room overhead and heated some water
over her oil stove; then, re-descending, set to work vigorously.

By nine o'clock she had almost finished with the schoolroom. She was
down on her hands and knees in the midst of a steaming muck of soapy
water. On her feet were a pair of man's shoes fastened with buckles;
a dirty cotton gown, damp with the water, clung about her shapeless,
stunted figure. From time to time she sat back on her heels to ease the
strain of her position, and with one smoking hand, white and parboiled
with the hot water, brushed her hair, already streaked with gray, out of
her weazened, pale face and the corners of her mouth.

It was very quiet. A gas-jet without a globe lit up the place with a
crude, raw light. The cat who lived on the premises, preferring to be
dirty rather than to be wet, had got into the coal scuttle, and over its
rim watched her sleepily with a long, complacent purr.

All at once he stopped purring, leaving an abrupt silence in the air
like the sudden shutting off of a stream of water, while his eyes grew
wide, two lambent disks of yellow in the heap of black fur.

"Who is there?" cried Trina, sitting back on her heels. In the stillness
that succeeded, the water dripped from her hands with the steady tick of
a clock. Then a brutal fist swung open the street door of the schoolroom
and McTeague came in. He was drunk; not with that drunkenness which is
stupid, maudlin, wavering on its feet, but with that which is alert,
unnaturally intelligent, vicious, perfectly steady, deadly wicked. Trina
only had to look once at him, and in an instant, with some strange sixth
sense, born of the occasion, knew what she had to expect.

She jumped up and ran from him into the little cloakroom. She locked and
bolted the door after her, and leaned her weigh