e clutch
the railing and lean her head against it. Miss Sophie had fainted.

"I must have been hungry," she mused over the charcoal fire in her
little room, "I must have been hungry;" and she smiled a wan smile, and
busied herself getting her evening meal of coffee and bread and ham.

If one were given to pity, the first thought that would rush to one's
lips at sight of Miss Sophie would have been, "Poor little woman!" She
had come among the bareness and sordidness of this neighbourhood five
years ago, robed in crape, and crying with great sobs that seemed to
shake the vitality out of her. Perfectly silent, too, she was about
her former life; but for all that, Michel, the quartee grocer at the
corner, and Madame Laurent, who kept the rabbe shop opposite, had fixed
it all up between them, of her sad history and past glories. Not that
they knew; but then Michel must invent something when the neighbours
came to him as their fountain-head of wisdom.

One morning little Miss Sophie opened wide her dingy windows to catch
the early freshness of the autumn wind as it whistled through the
yellow-leafed trees. It was one of those calm, blue-misted, balmy,
November days that New Orleans can have when all the rest of the
country is fur-wrapped. Miss Sophie pulled her machine to the window,
where the sweet, damp wind could whisk among her black locks.

Whirr, whirr, went the machine, ticking fast and lightly over the belts
of the rough jeans pants. Whirr, whirr, yes, and Miss Sophie was
actually humming a tune! She felt strangely light to-day.

"Ma foi," muttered Michel, strolling across the street to where Madame
Laurent sat sewing behind the counter on blue and brown-checked aprons,
"but the little ma'amselle sings. Perhaps she recollects."

"Perhaps," muttered the rabbe woman.

But little Miss Sophie felt restless. A strange impulse seemed drawing
her up town, and the machine seemed to run slow, slow, before it would
stitch all of the endless number of jeans belts. Her fingers trembled
with nervous haste as she pinned up the unwieldy black bundle of
finished work, and her feet fairly tripped over each other in their
eagerness to get to Claiborne Street, where she could board the up-town
car. There was a feverish desire to go somewhere, a sense of elation,
a foolish happiness that brought a faint echo of colour into her
pinched cheeks. She wondered why.

No one noticed her in the car. Passengers on the Claibo