ic.

His questioner's hands were at her sides where he did not see them
tighten convulsively, but he saw the pale cheeks go a shade whiter and
wondered if she was going to faint.

She did not faint, and though through the course of the evening the
elderly man found time, more than once, to turn his friendly glance of
solicitude her way he did not again intervene with questions. Clearly
this young woman, whatever the cause, was in a condition of nerves that
might mean skirting the precipitous edge of collapse. Clearly too she
had that fortitude which can resist and after a shock bring itself back
to the poise of equilibrium. What had shocked her? He could not guess,
but he knew that in the depleted condition that her pale cheeks and
thinness argued, unaccountable trifles may assume the gravity of a
crisis. And besides the critic found his attention and interest
elsewhere engaged. That other girl who was singing claimed them both.
She was having a little triumph there on the platform beside the piano.
On her smooth, dark face was a pink flush and her deep eyes glowed with
pleasure for the enthusiasm that had capped the cordiality of her
reception.

When the program came to its end the audience in large part gathered
about the platform and the meeting resolved itself into an informal
reception. Among the first to go forward was the critic and as he rose,
noticing a struggle between eagerness and hesitation in the violet eyes
of his chance neighbour, he yielded to an impulse of the moment.

"Shall we go up together," he smiled, "and introduce each other? I have
a question or two to ask her?"

But the girl shook her head. She had started nervously at the question
as though in realization that he had read her thoughts and as if she had
not wished them to be readable.

Still when he had left her she lingered in the door before she turned
out to the street as if some strong magnetism sought to draw her into
the group about the speaker and singer--a group in which her clothes
would have been conspicuous. Finally she turned and left and went
outside, where the obscurity was more merciful.

Her course took her southward and eastward and brought her at last to a
building that loomed large and dark now, but which in daylight sounded
to the shouts of immigrant children whose voices might have rung in the
sun-yellowed bazaars of Levantine towns or about the moujik habitations
of Russia. It was one of the settlement schools of