evening, to live for
that evening only, and do its work and die.

Upstairs behind closed doors, such a crowd was forming; getting ready to
think its own thoughts and act and feel, and so many houses, little and
big, had emptied themselves to contribute to it, so many family
discussions like the Saxons' had gone on as a prelude to it, that you
might fairly say the crowd up there was Green River.

Willard, watching the late arrivals and commenting upon them to Neil,
still an uncommunicative audience, was vaguely stirred.

"This gets me," he conceded. "There's something about old Dugan's music
that always gets me. For two cents, I'd go in. I sat through a patent
medicine show there last week, because I didn't have the sense to stay
away. It always gets me when there is anything doing in the hall.
And--" he paused, heavily testing his powers of self-analysis, "it gets
me," he brought out at length, "more to-night than it ever did before.
It--gets me."

"Look, there's Joe Grant," Willard went on. "This is his night, all
right. Look at the bulge to that manuscript case, and the shine to his
hair. He mixes varnish with his hair dye, all right. I said, look at
him."

"I'm looking."

"Well, you don't do much else. What's eating you to-night? Say, will you
go in if I will?"

An inarticulate murmur answered him.

"What's that?"

"No."

"All right. Well, what do you know about that? Look there."

"I'm looking."

The latest comers were crowding hurriedly into the entrance hall by this
time, and with them, a slender, heavily veiled figure had slipped
quickly through the door and out of sight.

"Was that Lil?" Willard said. "Lil Burr?"

"Yes."

"She wouldn't come here; I don't believe it."

"I know it."

"How?"

"She told me."

"What was she doing, talking to you? Why, she won't talk to anybody.
She----"

"You'll be late at Hallorans'."

"Aren't you coming?"

"No."

"But you said you would. I don't want to go if you don't. I don't half
like to leave you here, you act so queer to-night. What makes you act
so? What's eating----"

"Nothing."

Willard detached himself from the railings and regarded his friend,
suddenly breathless with surprise, and deeply grieved. Nothing. The
word, harmless in itself, had been spoken so that it hit him like an
actual blow, straight from the shoulder. Neil, shifting so that the
light showed his face, was returning his look with the sudden,
unreasoning anger that we f