peer more
sharply. They were Cora and Corliss; he was bending close to her;
her face was lifting to his.

"Ah, kiss me! Kiss me!" she whispered.

Hedrick dropped from the sill, climbed through a window of the
kitchen, hurried up the back-stairs, and reached his own apartment
in time to be violently ill in seclusion.

CHAPTER NINE

Villages are scattered plentifully over the unstable buttresses of
Vesuvius, and the inhabitants sleep o' nights: Why not? Quite
unaware that he was much of their condition, Mr. Madison bade his
incidental gossip and the tiny Lottie good-night, and sought his
early bed. He maintained in good faith that Saturday night was "a
great night to sleep," because of the later hour for rising;
probably having also some factitious conviction that there
prevailed a hush preparative of the Sabbath. As a matter of fact,
in summer, the other members of his family always looked
uncommonly haggard at the Sunday breakfast-table. Accepting
without question his preposterous legend of additional matutinal
slumber, they postponed retiring to a late hour, and were
awakened--simultaneously with thousands of fellow-sufferers--at
about half-after five on Sunday morning, by a journalistic
uprising. Over the town, in these early hours, rampaged the small
vendors of the manifold sheets: local papers and papers from
greater cities, hawker succeeding hawker with yell upon yell and
brain-piercing shrillings in unbearable cadences. No good burgher
ever complained: the people bore it, as in winter they bore the
smoke that injured their health, ruined their linen, spoiled their
complexions, forbade all hope of beauty and comfort in their city,
and destroyed the sweetness of their homes and of their wives. It
is an incredibly patient citizenry and exalts its persecutors.

Of the Madison family, Cora probably suffered most; and this was
the time when it was no advantage to have the front bedroom. She
had not slept until close upon dawn, and the hawkers woke her
irreparably; she could but rage upon her hot pillow. By and by,
there came a token that another anguish kept company with hers.
She had left her door open for a better circulation of the warm
and languid air, and from Hedrick's room issued an "_oof_!" of
agonized disgust. Cora little suspected that the youth reeked not
of newsboys: Hedrick's miseries were introspective.

The cries from the street were interminable; each howler in turn
heard faintly in the dis