r gates--the first they had come to.
They emerged into the species of _plaza_ formed by the numbered street
which constitutes the southern extremity of the park and the termination
of the Sixth Avenue. The glow of the splendid afternoon was over
everything, and the day seemed to Ransom still in its youth. The bowers
and boskages stretched behind them, the artificial lakes and cockneyfied
landscapes, making all the region bright with the sense of air and
space, and raw natural tints, and vegetation too diminutive to
overshadow. The chocolate-coloured houses, in tall, new rows, surveyed
the expanse; the street cars rattled in the foreground, changing horses
while the horses steamed, and absorbing and emitting passengers; and the
beer-saloons, with exposed shoulders and sides, which in New York do a
good deal towards representing the picturesque, the "bit" appreciated by
painters, announced themselves in signs of large lettering to the sky.
Groups of the unemployed, the children of disappointment from beyond the
seas, propped themselves against the low, sunny wall of the park; and on
the other side the commercial vista of the Sixth Avenue stretched away
with a remarkable absence of aerial perspective.

"I must go home; good-bye," Verena said, abruptly, to her companion.

"Go home? You won't come and dine, then?"

Verena knew people who dined at midday and others who dined in the
evening, and others still who never dined at all; but she knew no one
who dined at half-past three. Ransom's attachment to this idea therefore
struck her as queer and infelicitous, and she supposed it betrayed the
habits of Mississippi. But that couldn't make it any more acceptable to
her, in spite of his looking so disappointed--with his dimly-glowing
eyes--that he was heedless for the moment that the main fact connected
with her return to Tenth Street was that she wished to go alone.

"I must leave you, right away," she said. "Please don't ask me to stay;
you wouldn't if you knew how little I want to!" Her manner was different
now, and her face as well, and though she smiled more than ever she had
never seemed to him more serious.

"Alone, do you mean? Really I can't let you do that," Ransom replied,
extremely shocked at this sacrifice being asked of him. "I have brought
you this immense distance, I am responsible for you, and I must place
you where I found you."

"Mr. Ransom, I must, I will!" she exclaimed, in a tone he had not yet
heard h