Outside, not even to be gainsaid by Sixth Avenue, the night was like a moist flower held to the face.  A spring shower, hardly fallen, was already drying on the sidewalks, and from the patch of Bryant Park across the maze of car-tracks there stole the immemorial scent of rain-water and black earth, a just-set-out crescent of hyacinths giving off their light steam of fragrance.  How insidious is an old scent!  It can creep into the heart like an ache.  Who has not loved beside thyme or at the sweetness of dusk?  Dear, silenced laughs can come back on a whiff from a florist’s shop.  Oh, there is a nostalgia lurks in old scents!

Even to Hanna de Long, hurrying eastward on Forty-second Street, huggingly against the shadow of darkened shop-windows, there was a new sting of tears at the smell of earth, daring, in the lull of a city night, to steal out.

There are always these dark figures that scuttle thus through the first hours of the morning.

Whither?

Twice remarks were flung after her from passing figures in
slouch-hats—­furtive remarks through closed lips.

At five minutes past one she was at the ticket-office grating of a train-terminal that was more ornate than a rajah’s dream.

“Adalia—­please.  Huh?  Ohio.  Next train.”

“Seven-seven.  Track nine.  Round trip?”

“N-no.”

“Eighteen-fifty.”

She again bit open the corner knot of her handkerchief.

* * * * *

When Hanna de Long, freshly train-washed of train dust, walked down Third Street away from the station, old man Rentzenauer, for forty-odd springs coaxing over the same garden, was spraying a hose over a side-yard of petunias, shirt-sleeved, his waistcoat hanging open, and in the purpling light his old head merging back against a story-and-a-half house the color of gray weather and half a century of service.

At sight of him who had shambled so taken-for-granted through all of her girlhood, such a trembling seized hold of Hanna de Long that she turned off down Amboy Street, making another wide detour to avoid a group on the Koerner porch, finally approaching Second Street from the somewhat straggly end of it farthest from the station.

She was trembling so that occasionally she stopped against a vertigo that went with it, wiped up under the curtain of purple veil at the beads of perspiration which would spring out along her upper lip.  She was quite washed of rouge, except just a swift finger-stroke of it over the cheek-bones.

She had taken out the dicky, too, and for some reason filled in there with a flounce of pink net ripped off from the little ruffles that had flowed out from her sleeves.  She was without baggage.

At Ludlow Street she could suddenly see the house, the trees meeting before it in a lace of green, the two iron jardinieres empty.  They had been painted, and were drying now of a clay-brown coat.