she walked thus, invariably next to the water’s edge or in the first street running parallel to it.  Truck-drivers gazed at and sang after her.  Deck-and dock-hands, stretched out in the first sun of spring, opened their eyes to her passing, often staring after her under lazy lids.  Behind a drawn veil her lips were moving, but inaudibly now.  Motor-trucks, blocks of them, painted the gray of war, stood waiting shipment, engines ready to throb into no telling what mire.  Once a van of knitted stuffs, always the gray, corded and bound into bales, rumbled by, close enough to graze and send her stumbling back.  She stood for a moment watching it lumber up alongside a dock.

It was dusk when she emerged from the rather sinister end of West Street into Battery Park, receding in a gracious new-green curve from the water.  Tier after tier of lights had begun to prick out in the back-drop of skyscraping office-buildings.  The little park, after the six-o’clock stampede, settled back into a sort of lamplit quiet, dark figures, the dregs of a city day, here and there on its benches.  The back-drop of office-lights began to blink out then, all except the tallest tower in the world, rising in the glory of its own spotlight into a rococo pinnacle of man’s accomplishment.

Strolling the edge of that park so close to the water that she could hear it seethe in the receding, a policeman finally took to following Mrs. Ross, his measured tread behind hers, his night-stick rapping out every so often.  She found out a bench then, and never out of his view, sat looking out across the infinitude of blackness to where the bay so casually meets the sea.  Night dampness had sent her shivering, the plumage of her hat, the ferny feathers of the bird-of-paradise, drooping almost grotesquely over the brim.

A small detachment of Boy Scouts, sturdy with an enormous sense of uniform and valor, marched through the asphalt alleys of the park with trained, small-footed, regimental precision—­small boys with clean, lifted faces.  A fife and drum came up the road.

Rat-a-tat-tat!  Rat-a-tat-tat!

High over the water a light had come out—­Liberty’s high-flung torch.  Watching it, and quickened by the fife and drum to an erect sitting posture, Mrs. Ross slid forward on her bench, lips opening.  The policeman standing off, rapped twice, and when she rose, almost running toward the lights of the Elevated station, followed.

Within her apartment on upper Broadway, not even a hall light burned when she let herself in with her key.  At the remote end of the aisle of blackness a slit of yellow showed beneath the door, behind it the babble of servants’ voices.

She entered with a stealth that was well under cover of those voices, groping into the first door at her right, feeling round for the wall key, switching the old rose-and-gold room into immediate light.  Stood for a moment, her plumage drooping damply to her shoulders, blue foulard dress snagged in two places, her gold mesh bag with the sapphire-and-diamond top hanging low from the crook of her little finger.  A clock ticked with almost an echo into the rather vast silence.