_this_ time. Good night, dear."

"Good night, Hazie," he whispered. "Here's a kiss to dream on."

Miss Weir broke away from him laughingly, ran along the path, and up
the steps, kissed her finger-tips to the lingering figure by the gate,
and went in.

"Bed," she soliloquized, "is the place for me right quickly if I'm
going to be up and dressed and have that lunch ready by ten o'clock. I
wish I weren't such a sleepyhead--or else that I weren't a 'pore
wurrkin' gurl.'"

At which last conceit she laughed softly. Because, for a "pore
wurrkin' gurl," Miss Weir was fairly well content with her lot. She
had no one dependent on her--a state of affairs which, if it
occasionally leads to loneliness, has its compensations. Her salary as
a stenographer amply covered her living expenses, and even permitted
her to put by a few dollars monthly. She had grown up in Granville.
She had her own circle of friends. So that she was comfortable, even
happy, in the present--and Jack Barrow proposed to settle the problem
of her future; with youth's optimism, they two considered it already
settled. Six months more, and there was to be a wedding, a
three-weeks' honeymoon, and a final settling down in a little cottage
on the West Side; everybody in Granville who amounted to anything lived
on the West Side. Then she would have nothing to do but make the home
nest cozy, while Jack kept pace with a real-estate business that was
growing beyond his most sanguine expectations.

She threw her light wraps over the back of a chair, and, standing
before her dresser, took the multitude of pins out of her hair and
tumbled it, a cloudy black mass, about her shoulders. Occupying the
center of the dresser, in a leaning silver frame, stood a picture of
Jack Barrow. She stood looking at it a minute, smiling absently. It
was spring, and her landlady's daughter had set a bunch of wild flowers
in a jar beside the picture. Hazel picked out a daisy and plucked away
the petals one by one.

"He loves me--he loves me not--he loves me--" Her lips formed the
words inaudibly, as countless lips have formed them in love's history,
and the last petal fluttered away at "not."

She smiled.

"I wonder if that's an omen?" she murmured. "Pshaw! What a silly
idea! I'm going to bed. Good night, Johnny boy."

She kissed her finger-tips to him again across the rooftops all grimed
with a winter's soot, and within fifteen minutes Miss Weir was sound
asleep.