part of Anne's old world was lost.

Anne herself went over to the avenue and climbed to the roof of a bus.

On the way downtown as the traffic crowded, the limousine and the
omnibus passed and repassed each other. It was a frostily clear forenoon
with Fifth Avenue sparkling like a string of jewel beads, and sometimes
Anne could see Happy's face thrust out with wonderment written large
upon its features. To her it was all new: this miracle of a city of
millions. Her heart was fluttering to the first sight of that tide of
men and motors; that crest-pluming of wealth and undertow of misery;
that gaiety and tragedy that rolls in vigour and in poison along a
mighty urban artery.

But Anne felt like a fragment of flotsam carried hopelessly on the
current.

When the limousine had turned into a side street of dignified old
houses, Anne rode on, and leaving the bus made her way on foot through
meaner streets where the smell of garlic hung pervasive and the
gutturals of Slavic speech came from bearded and beady eyed faces. She
went through the East Side's warrens of congestion and poverty,
slipping through crowds of shawled and haggling women who elbowed about
push-carts.

Yet when she had time to retreat again to the sanctuary of her own small
room, Anne felt that an element of augmented strength had come to her,
as if she had caught a breath of the laurel bloom from Slag-face through
the stenches and the jargons.

"If I can hold out," she told herself, "if I can only hold out, I'll
have my self-respect!" After a moment she added, "She will probably see
him soon, but she can't tell him she saw me--because she doesn't know
it."

CHAPTER XLIV

Uncle Billy Taulbee's store had stood for a half century in the shade of
mighty sycamores, where a trickle of water glinted over pebble and
shale, worn hub-deep into wheel-ruts. Except when the spring thaws
carried a tawny flood up almost to the edge of his doorstep and the
"tide" had right of way, that creek bed and the sandy lane angling
across it constituted the junction of the Smoky Hollow Road and that
debouching over to "The left hand fork of Nighway Creek." Roundabout it
were streamlets with pools where, in season, the mountain trout leaped
and darted in shimmering flashes, and to the store one summer noon came
two hungry fishermen from the lowlands. They sat on cracker boxes,
eating canned peaches and "Vienny" sausages, encouraging the keen-eyed
old storekeeper to