et before him,
where a dismal spring wind was stirring chaff and papers about the
subway entrance, and surface cars were grinding and ringing on the
curve.

It looked dull and empty--dull and empty, he thought. She had been very
happy, looking up at her man, kissing her people good-bye. She was a
remarkable woman, Norma.

"A remarkable woman--Norma," he said, half-aloud. "She will make him a
wonderful wife; she will help him to go a long way. And she never would
have had patience for formal living; it wasn't in her!"

But he remembered what was in her, what eager gaiety, what hunger for
new impressions, what courage in seizing her dilemmas the instant she
saw them. He remembered the flash of her eyes, and the curve of her
proud little mouth.

"Theodore had more charm than any of them," he said, "and she is like
him. Well--perhaps I'll meet somebody like her, some day, and the story
will have a different ending!"

But he knew in his heart that there was nobody like her, and that she
had gone out of his life for ever.

* * * * *

They had hung the belted brown coat over the big new gray one in the
drawing-room, and Norma had brushed her hair, and Wolf had shoved the
suit-cases under the seats, and they had gone straight into the
dining-car, and were at a lighted little shining table by this time.
Wolf had had no lunch; Norma was, she said, starving. They ordered their
meal just as the train drew out of the underground arcades and swept
over the city, in the twilight of the dull, sunless day.

Norma looked down, and joy and a vague heartache struggled within her.
The little city blocks, draped with their frail tangles of fire-escapes,
were as clean-cut as toys. In the streets children were screaming and
racing, at the doorways women loitered and talked. Great trucks lumbered
in and out among surging pedestrians, and women and children stood
before the green-grocers' displays of oranges and cabbages, and trickled
in and out of the markets, where cheap cuts were advertised in great
chalk signs on the windows. Red brick, yellow brick, gray cement, the
streets fled by; the dear, familiar streets that she and Wolf, and she
and Rose, had tramped and explored, in the burning dry heat of July, in
the flutter of November's first snows.

"Say good-bye to it, Wolf; it will be a long time before we see New York
again!"

Wolf looked down, grinning. Then, as they left the city, and the dusk
d