and me she's got to start now. We'll go on board to-night!"

A half-hour later Millie was on her knees packing a trunk, and her
husband was telephoning to the drug-store for a sponge-bag and a cure
for seasickness.

Owing to the joy in her heart and to the fact that she was on her
knees, Millie was alternately weeping into the trunk-tray and offering
up incoherent prayers of thanksgiving. Suddenly she sank back upon the
floor.

"John!" she cried, "doesn't it seem sinful to sail away in a 'royal
suite' and leave this beautiful flat empty?"

Over the telephone John was having trouble with the drug clerk.

"No!" he explained, "I'm not seasick now. The medicine I want is to be
taken later. I know I'm speaking from the Pavonia; but the Pavonia
isn't a ship; it's an apartment-house."

He turned to Millie. "We can't be in two places at the same time," he
suggested.

"But, think," insisted Millie, "of all the poor people stifling
to-night in this heat, trying to sleep on the roofs and fire-escapes;
and our flat so cool and big and pretty--and no one in it."

John nodded his head proudly.

"I know it's big," he said, "but it isn't big enough to hold all the
people who are sleeping to-night on the roofs and in the parks."

"I was thinking of your brother--and Grace," said Millie. "They've
been married only two weeks now, and they're in a stuffy hall bedroom
and eating with all the other boarders. Think what our flat would mean
to them; to be by themselves, with eight rooms and their own kitchen
and bath, and our new refrigerator and the gramophone! It would be
heaven! It would be a real honeymoon!"

Abandoning the drug clerk, John lifted Millie in his arms and kissed
her, for, next to his wife, nearest his heart was the younger brother.

The younger brother and Grace were sitting on the stoop of the
boarding-house. On the upper steps, in their shirt-sleeves, were the
other boarders; so the bride and bridegroom spoke in whispers. The air
of the cross street was stale and stagnant; from it rose exhalations of
rotting fruit, the gases of an open subway, the smoke of passing
taxicabs. But between the street and the hall bedroom, with its odors
of a gas-stove and a kitchen, the choice was difficult.

"We've got to cool off somehow," the young husband was saying, "or you
won't sleep. Shall we treat ourselves to ice-cream sodas or a trip on
the Weehawken ferry-boat?"

"The ferry-boat!" begged the girl, "whe