ken.
Then, with a sudden frantic terror in her eyes, she begged him, not
to--begged him to go away, if he had any mercy for her at all, quickly
and without a word. In a sort of daze he obeyed her.

The tardy winter morning, looking through her grimy window, found her
sitting there, huddled in a big bath-robe, just as she'd been when he
closed the door.

CHAPTER XII

"I'M ALL ALONE"

The same grizzly dawn that looked in on Rose through the dim window of
her room on Clark Street, saw Rodney letting himself in his own front
door with a latch-key after hours of aimless tramping through deserted,
unrecognized streets. He was in a welter of emotions he could no more
have given names to than to the streets whose dreary lengths he had
plodded.

The one thing that isolated itself from the rest, climbed up into his
mind and there kept goading him into a weak helpless fury, was a
jingling tune and a set of silly words that Rose and her sisters in the
sextette had sung the night before: "You're all alone, I'm all alone;
come on, let's be lonesome together." And then a line he couldn't
remember exactly, containing, for the sake of the rhyme, some total
irrelevancy about the weather, and a sickening bit of false rhyming to
end up with, about loving forever and ever. The jingle of that tune had
kept time to his steps, and the silly words had sung themselves over and
over endlessly in his brain until the mockery of it had become
absolutely excruciating. Except for that damnable tune, there was
nothing in his mind at all. Everything else was synthesized into a dull
ache, a hollow, gnawing, physical ache. But he'd endure that, he
thought, if he could get rid of the diabolical malice of that tune.
Perhaps if he stopped walking and just sat still it would go away.

That's why he went home, let himself in with his latch-key and made his
way furtively to the library, where the embers of last night's fire were
still warm. He had an hour at least before the servants would be
stirring. He was terribly cold and pretty well exhausted, and the
comfort of his big chair and the glow of the fire carried him off
irresistibly into a doze--a doze that was troubled by fantastic dreams.

With the first early morning stirrings in the house, the sounds of
opening doors here and there, the penetrating cry of one of the
babies--muffled, to be sure, and a long way off, but still audible--he
came broad awake again, but sat for a while staring a