ghed, a little
high hysterical laugh. Then she bit her lip, and then she was silent for
a long time. He was silent, too, until suddenly he heard a little sound
that made him turn quickly to look at her stumbling along at his side.
And she was crying.

"Why--what's the matter! What's!----"

"I'm tired," sobbed Myra, and sank in a little limp heap on a convenient
rock. "I'm tired. I want to go home."

"Why"--he was plainly bewildered--"why didn't you tell me you were
tired!"

"I'm telling you now."

They took the nearest ferry across the river, and the Subway home. At
the entrance to the noisy, crowded flat in which she lived Myra turned
to face him. She was through with pretense. She was tired of
make-believe. She felt a certain relief in the thought of what she had
to say. She faced him squarely.

"I've lived in the city all my life and I'm crazy about it. I love it. I
like to walk in the park a little maybe, Sundays, but I hate tramping
like we did this afternoon, and you might as well know it. I wouldn't
chop down a tree, not if I was freezing to death, and I'd hate to have
to sleep in a tent, so there! I hate sunburn, and freckles, and ants in
the pie, and blisters on my feet, and getting wet, and flat-heeled
shoes, and I never saddled a horse. I'd be afraid to. And what's more, I
don't believe you do, either."

"Don't believe I do what?" asked Florian in a stunned kind of voice.

But Myra had turned and left him. And as he stood there, aghast,
bewildered, resentful, clear and fair in the back of his mind, against
all the turmoil of thoughts that seethed there, was the picture of her
white, slim, exquisite throat with a little delicate pulse beating in it
as she cried out her rebellion. He wished--or some one inside him that
he could not control wished--that he could put his fingers there on her
throat, gently.

It was very warm that evening, for May. And as he sat by the window in
his pajamas, just before going to bed, he thought about Myra, and he
thought about himself. But when he thought about himself he slammed the
door on what he saw. Florian's rooms were in Lexington Avenue in the old
brownstone district that used to be the home of white-headed
millionaires with gold-headed canes, who, on dying, left their millions
to an Alger newsboy who had once helped them across the street.
Millionaires, gold-headed canes, and newsboys had long vanished, and the
old brownstone fronts were rooming houses now, in