to see him from my room. You know you can see stars even in the
daytime from the bottom of a well. At night my room is like the shaft of
a coal mine, and it makes Billy Jackson look like the big diamond pin
that Night fastens her kimono with."

There came a time after that when Miss Leeson brought no formidable
papers home to copy. And when she went out in the morning, instead of
working, she went from office to office and let her heart melt away in
the drip of cold refusals transmitted through insolent office boys. This
went on.

There came an evening when she wearily climbed Mrs. Parker's stoop at
the hour when she always returned from her dinner at the restaurant. But
she had had no dinner.

As she stepped into the hall Mr. Hoover met her and seized his chance.
He asked her to marry him, and his fatness hovered above her like an
avalanche. She dodged, and caught the balustrade. He tried for her hand,
and she raised it and smote him weakly in the face. Step by step she
went up, dragging herself by the railing. She passed Mr. Skidder's door
as he was red-inking a stage direction for Myrtle Delorme (Miss Leeson)
in his (unaccepted) comedy, to "pirouette across stage from L to the
side of the Count." Up the carpeted ladder she crawled at last and
opened the door of the skylight room.

She was too weak to light the lamp or to undress. She fell upon the iron
cot, her fragile body scarcely hollowing the worn springs. And in that
Erebus of the skylight room, she slowly raised her heavy eyelids, and
smiled.

For Billy Jackson was shining down on her, calm and bright and constant
through the skylight. There was no world about her. She was sunk in a
pit of blackness, with but that small square of pallid light framing the
star that she had so whimsically and oh, so ineffectually named. Miss
Longnecker must be right; it was Gamma, of the constellation Cassiopeia,
and not Billy Jackson. And yet she could not let it be Gamma.

As she lay on her back she tried twice to raise her arm. The third time
she got two thin fingers to her lips and blew a kiss out of the black
pit to Billy Jackson. Her arm fell back limply.

"Good-bye, Billy," she murmured faintly. "You're millions of miles away
and you won't even twinkle once. But you kept where I could see you most
of the time up there when there wasn't anything else but darkness to
look at, didn't you? . . . Millions of miles. . . . Good-bye, Billy
Jackson."

Clara, the coloured