the power-house, lady," he told her, "and
that line ain't runnin'."

Lydia gave an exclamation of dismay. "But I must get back to Bellevue
to-night!"

Paul was out of town, but she knew the agonies of anxiety 'Stashie would
suffer if she did not appear. "Oh, but I can telephone," she reminded
herself.

"You kin get out there if you don't mind takin' the long way around,"
the man explained with a friendly interest. "If you take the Garfield
line and change at Ironton to the Onteora branch, it'll bring you back
on the other side of Bellevue, and Bellevue ain't so big but what it
won't be a very long walk to where you live."

Lydia thanked him, touched, as she so often was, with the kind and, to
her, welcome absence of impersonality in working people; and, assuring
herself that she had time enough to eat something before her car's
departure, betook herself to a dairy lunch-room where she ate a
conscientiously substantial supper. The heat of the day had left her
little appetite; but to "take care of herself" now seemed at last one of
the worth-while things to do which she had always had so eager a
longing.

At seven o'clock she took the trolley pointed out to her by her friend,
the starter, who noticed and remembered her when she returned to the
waiting-room. The evening rush was over, and for some time she was the
only passenger. Then a very tired-looking, middle-aged man, an
accountant perhaps, in a shabby alpaca coat, boarded the car and sank at
once into a restless doze, his heat-paled face nodding about like a
broken-necked doll's. Lydia herself felt heavy on her the death-like
fatigue which the last weeks had brought to her, but she was not sleepy.
She looked out intently at the flat, fertile, kindly country, gradually
darkening in the summer twilight. She was very fond of her home
landscape. She had not taken so considerable a journey on a trolley for
a long time--perhaps not since the trip to the Mallory house-party. That
was a long time ago.

At the edge of thick woods the car came to a sudden stop. The lights
went out. The conductor disappeared, twitched at the trolley, and went
around for a consultation with the motorman, who had at once
philosophically pulled off his worn glove and sat down on the step.
"Power's off!" he called back casually into the car to the accountant,
who had started up wildly, with the idea, apparently, that he had been
carried past his station. "We've got to wait till they turn he