w ornaments,
winding the clock that struck ships' bells instead of hours, and turning
the wicks of the old empire lamps that hung in brass brackets on either
side the fireplace. Lloyd, after building the agency, had felt no
scruple in choosing the best room in the house and furnishing it
according to her taste. Her room was beautiful, but very simple in its
appointments. There were great flat wall-space unspoiled by bric-a-brac,
the floor marquetry, with but few rugs. The fireplace and its
appurtenances were of brass. Her writing-desk, a huge affair, of ancient
and almost black San Domingo mahogany.

But soon she wearied of the small business of pottering about her clock
and lamps, and, turning to the window, opened it, and, leaning upon her
elbows, looked down into the square.

By now the thunderstorm was gone, like the withdrawal of a dark curtain;
the sun was out again over the City. The square, deserted but half an
hour ago, was reinvaded with its little people of nurse-maids,
gray-coated policemen, and loungers reading their papers on the benches
near the fountain. The elms still dripped, their wet leaves glistening
again to the sun. There was a delicious smell in the air--a smell of
warm, wet grass, of leaves and drenched bark from the trees. On the far
side of the square, seen at intervals in the spaces between the foliage,
a passing truck painted vermilion set a brisk note of colour in the
scene. A newsboy appeared chanting the evening editions. On a sudden and
from somewhere close at hand an unseen hand-piano broke out into a gay,
jangling quickstep, marking the time with delightful precision.

A carriage, its fine lacquered flanks gleaming in the sunlight, rolled
through the square, on its way, no doubt, to the very fashionable
quarter of the City just beyond. Lloyd had a glimpse of the girl leaning
back in its cushions, a girl of her own age, with whom she had some
slight acquaintance. For a moment Lloyd, ridden with her terrors, asked
herself if this girl, with no capabilities for either great happiness or
great sorrow, were not perhaps, after all, happier than she. But she
recoiled instantly, murmuring to herself with a certain fierce energy:

"No, no; after all, I have lived."

And how had she lived? For the moment Lloyd was willing to compare
herself with the girl in the landau. Swiftly she ran over her own life
from the time when left an orphan; in the year of her majority she had
become her own mis