She caught up
her wrap and crept after him.

"I wonder," Daragh paused in the outer hall, "would I better cover him
up?"

Jane nodded.

"Wait, then! I'll be soon back!"

When he came out again he was smiling. "Fine and fast asleep he is. He'll
never open an eye for hours! I'll look in on him again, on my way home
to-night. You were the wonder of the world to him, Jane Vail. But"--he
halted on the sidewalk and peered contritely at her through the soft
spring twilight,--"you are cruel weary!"

"I am ... tired," said Jane.

His voice gathered alarm. "I've never seen you the like of this. Shall I
be finding a cab to rush you home?"

Pride (where was her decent pride?) rallied in her, and took the place of
the earlier, racking rage. "I am not going home. I am going uptown--to
the theater. I've a new man in the character part." Suddenly she knew
what she was going to do. "I am going to meet Rodney Harrison there, and
we are going to have supper, and to drive!" Her voice grew decisive
again. That was it. Rodney Harrison. The man-she-met-on-the-boat. He
would be waiting for her, and he wanted her, and she intended to want
him. She visualized his special delivery letter, lying on her desk.
Rodney was quite justified. They would "settle the matter once and for
all, definitely and right." She would marry Rodney Harrison, and they
would live like sane human beings, comfortably, logically, merrily, and
there would be no dope fiends with plucking fingers and no Fallen Sisters
and self-righteous settlement workers and no drab days and drab ways in
their scheme of things.

"Well, then," Michael was still staring at her, unhappily, "will it be
the bus, or a taxi? Myself must go in the subway to another poor lad who
is waiting in Ninety-first Street, but----"

"I may as well take the subway, too." (He was not to suppose or surmise
that it bothered or burdened her to be with him.) "It will make me too
early, but there's a lot to talk over with them all. I've rather
neglected things lately." (Mooning in her candy-motto paradise!)

"I'm doubting the upper air is better for you, the way you're so white
and weary," Michael shook his head, but they went down from the mild
spring weather into the glare and blare of the world beneath. It was the
hour of the last mad homeward rush of the workers. They found seats, but
at the next station the packing and jamming began, and when they left the
third stop the car was a solid, cohesive m