. As Janet's glance wandered
down the line it was arrested by the face of a man in a visored woollen
cap--a face that was almost sepia, in which large white eyeballs struck
a note of hatred. And what she seemed to see in it, confronting her,
were the hatred and despair of her own soul! The man might have been a
Hungarian or a Pole; the breadth of his chin was accentuated by a wide,
black moustache, his attitude was tense,--that of a maddened beast ready
to spring at the soldier in front of him. He was plainly one of those
who had reached the mental limit of endurance.

In contrast with this foreigner, confronting him, a young lieutenant
stood motionless, his head cocked on one side, his hand grasping the
club held a little behind him, his glance meeting the other's squarely,
but with a different quality of defiance. All his faculties were on the
alert. He wore no overcoat, and the uniform fitting close to his figure,
the broad-brimmed campaign hat of felt served to bring into relief
the physical characteristics of the American Anglo-Saxon, of the
individualist who became the fighting pioneer. But Janet, save to
register the presence of the intense antagonism between the two,
scarcely noticed her fellow countryman.... Every moment she expected to
see the black man spring,--and yet movement would have marred the drama
of that consuming hatred....

Then, by one of those bewildering, kaleidoscopic shifts to which crowds
are subject, the scene changed, more troops arrived, little by little
the people were dispersed to drift together again by chance--in smaller
numbers--several blocks away. Perhaps a hundred and fifty were scattered
over the space formed by the intersection of two streets, where three or
four special policemen with night sticks urged them on. Not a riot,
or anything approaching it. The police were jeered, but the groups,
apparently, had already begun to scatter, when from the triangular
vestibule of a saloon on the corner darted a flame followed by an
echoing report, a woman bundled up in a shawl screamed and sank on the
snow. For an instant the little French-Canadian policeman whom the shot
had missed gazed stupidly down at her....

As Janet ran along the dark pavements the sound of the shot and of the
woman's shriek continued to ring in her ears. At last she stopped
in front of the warehouse beyond Mr. Tiernan's shop, staring at the
darkened windows of the flat--of the front room in which her mother now