e traces some day?" his thoughts would run; and again, "Suppose I
should be in a theater fire, and 'disappear,' and never come back, and
she'd think I was dead," "Suppose there should be a war, and I should
enlist," ... and so forth, and so forth. "Fool thoughts," of course!--but
Maurice is not the only man upon whom a jealous woman has thrust such
thoughts, or who has found solace in the impossible! So, now, wandering
about in the cold, he amused himself by imagining various ways of
"kicking over the traces"; then, suddenly, it occurred to him that he
wanted something to eat. "By George!" he thought, "I'll get that girl,
Lily, and we'll go and have a good dinner!"

Even in the rococo vestibule of the yellow-brick apartment house, while
he pressed the bell below Miss Lily Dale's letter box, he began to feel
a glow of comfort; and when Lily let him into her little parlor, all
clean and vulgar and warm, and fragrant with blossoming bulbs, and gave
him a greeting that was almost childlike in its laughing pleasure, his
sense of physical well-being was a sort of hitting back at Eleanor.

"Oh," said little Lily, "my! Ain't you cold! Why, your hand's just like
ice!"

He let her help him off with his coat, and push him into what had been
the vanished Batty's chair; then she saw that his feet were wet, and
insisted (to his horror) on unlacing his boots and making him put on a
pair of slippers.

"But I was going to take you out to dinner," he remonstrated.

She said: "Oh no! It's cold. I'll cook something for you, and we'll have
our dinner right by that fire."

"Can you cook?" he said, with admiring astonishment.

"You bet I can!" she said; "I'll give you a _good_ supper: you just
wait!" In her pretty, laughing face was very honest friendliness. "I
'ain't forgot that time you handed it out to Batty! He had a bruise on
his chin for a week!"

"A steak!" he exclaimed, watching her preparations in the tiny closet of
a kitchen that opened into her parlor.

She nodded: "Ain't it luck to have it in the house? A friend of mine
gave it to me this afternoon; her father's a butcher; and he's got a
dandy shop on the next block; an' Annie run in with it, an' she says"
(Lily was greasing her broiler), "'there,' she says, 'is a present for
you!'"

Maurice insisted upon helping, and was told where to get the dishes and
what to put on the table, and that if he opened that closet he'd see the
beer. "I got just one bottle," she said, ch