he griddle of a merciless
August--an exhausted day was duskening into a scarcely less kind
twilight; she could feel the brick wall of the building exhaling like a
furnace.

It was characteristic of Lilly that, with the thermometer up in three
figures and her own mental mercury well toward the top of the tube, she
should strike the one note of relief in a Saharan aridness. She
suggested the drip of clear water in a grotto or the inmost petals of a
tight-closed rose. If her throat ached and strained to keep down the
tears, her neck, where the sheer white collar fell away, was cold and
chaste; if anger and resentment were pounding through her veins the
fresh firmness of her flesh did not betray it.

She leaned her head against the window-frame and looked down with a
certain remoteness upon the human caldron three stories removed. Lights
were beginning to prick out wanly; the bang and clang of humanity,
distant, but none the less insistent, came up to her in a medley of
street-car clangs, shouts, and hum-hum. Children cried.

Upon a fire-escape level with her own window a child, with bare feet
extended over the iron rail, slept on an improvised bed; from the
interior of that same apartment came the wail of a sick infant. A woman
nude to the waist passed to and fro before the open window, crooning to
the bundle she carried in the crook of her arm. Lilly's mouth hung at
the corners.

Came darkness, she passed out into the kitchen and covered the
slow-cooking chops with a tin lid, lighted the gas-jet, turning the
flame down into a mere bead, and resumed her watch at the front window.

Clear like a clarion a familiar whistle ripped through the din of the
street and came up to her sharp and undiverted--two clean calls and a
long, quavering ritornelle. At that signal, for the year and a half of
their married life, Lilly had unfailingly fluttered a white handkerchief
of greeting from the three flights up. Her arm contracted reflexly, but
she stayed it and stepped back into the frame of the window, leaning
straight and tense against the jamb. Her pulse leaped into the hundreds
as she stood there, her arms hugging her sides and her blouse rising and
falling with the heave of her bosom, her handkerchief a tight little wad
in the palm of her hand.

Again the call, tearing straight and true to its destination! She
remained taut as stretched elastic. There was a wondering interim--and a
third time the signal split the air, sharp-