n mind or
any avowed plan or hope for what should happen when they reached it. Yet
he walked purposefully and, little by little, faster. He looked about
him in a sort of dazed bewilderment when she disengaged her hand and
stopped, at last, at the corner of the delicatessen shop, beside the
entrance to her little tunnel.

"Here's where I live," she said.

"Where you _live!_" he echoed blankly.

"Ever since I went away--to California. I've been right here--where I
could almost see the smoke of your chimneys. I've a queer little room--I
only pay three dollars a week for it--but--it's big enough to be alone
in."

"Rose ..." he said hoarsely.

A drunken man came lurching pitiably down the street. She shrank into
the dark mouth of the passage and Rodney followed her, found her with
his hands, and heard her voice, speaking breathlessly, in gasps. He
hardly knew what she was saying.

"It's been wonderful.... I know we haven't talked; we'll do that some
other time, somewhere where we can.... But to-night, walking along like
that, just as ... To-morrow, I shall think it was all a dream."

"Rose ..."

"Wh-what is it?" she prompted, at last.

"Let me in," he said. "Don't turn me away to-night! I--I can't ..."

The only sound that came in answer was a long tremulously indrawn
breath. But presently her hand took the one of his that had been
clutching her shoulder and led him toward the end of the passage, where
a faint light through a transom showed a door. She opened the door with
a latch-key, and then, behind her, he made his way up two flights of
narrow stairs, whose faint creak made all the sound there was. In the
black little corridor at the top she unlocked another door.

"Wait till I light the gas," she breathed.

There was nothing furtive about their silence; it was the wonder, the
magic of being together again, that made them steal forward like awed
children.

Into an ugly, dingy, cramped, cold little room, with a rickety dresser
and a lumpy bed and a grimy window, rattling fiercely in the gusts of
wind that went whipping down the street.... Into a palace of
enchantment.

She left the gas turned low, took off her hat and ulster, pulled down
the blind over the window and shut the door, hung up a garment that had
been left flung over her trunk and dumped a bundle of laundry that had
not been put away, into a bureau drawer. All the time he'd been watching
her hungrily, without a word.

She turned and looked