ore it his own personal afflictions appeared as
unsubstantial as shades. At least he had had the empty dignity of
receiving his sorrow with a full sense of its importance, but with this
woman the very presence of grief was crowded out by the brutal
obligation to meet the material demands of death. Death, indeed, had
become but an incident--a side issue of the event--and the funeral had
usurped the place and the importance of a law of nature.

"Let me go home with you--I should like it," he said when they had
started to walk on again; and then with an instinctive courtesy, he took
the basket from her and slipped it over his own arm. A little later,
when following her directions, they entered a surface car for the West
Side, he placed the basket on his knees and sat looking down at the
small gray kittens that awaking suddenly began to play beneath his eyes.
The jostling crowd about him, the substantial panting figure of the
woman beside him, and more than all the joyous animal movements of the
kittens in his lap, seemed somehow to return to him that intimate
relation to life which he had lost. He no longer felt the sensation of
detachment, of insecurity in his surroundings; for his own individual
existence had become in his eyes but a part of the enlarged universal
existence of the race.

As the car stopped the woman motioned to him with an imperative gesture,
and then as they reached the sidewalk, she pointed to a fruiterer's
stand on the outside of a tenement near the corner.

"It is just above there--on the third floor," she said, threading her
way with a large determined ease through the children playing upon the
sidewalk.

When he mounted presently the dimly lighted staircase inside, it seemed
to Adams that the whole house, close, poorly-lighted, dust laden as it
was, was filled to the echo with the ceaseless voices of
children--laughing voices, crying voices, scolding voices, voices lifted
as high in joy as in grief. So strong was his impression of the number
of the little inmates that he was almost surprised when the woman pushed
open a door on the third landing and led the way into a room which
appeared deserted except for the occupant of the clean white bed by the
window.

The whole place was scrupulously neat, he saw this at the first
glance--saw the well swept floor, the orderly arrangement of the chairs,
the spotless white cambric curtains parted above the window sill, on
which a red geranium bore a sing