“Can’t you see they’re half-dead now?  What you wanna cheer her up with—­a corpse?  If I had my way, I’d wring the whole display’s neck, anyhow.”

“What’ll you take for one, bo?”

“It’ll freeze to death.”

“Look!  This side pocket is lined with velvet.”

“Dollar.”

“Aw, I said one, friend, not the whole brood.”

“Leave or take.”

Mr. Connors dug deep.

“Make it sixty cents and a poker-chip, bo.  It’s every cent I got in my pocket.”

“Keep the poker-chip for pin-money.”

When Mr. Connors emerged, a small, chirruping bunch of fuzz, cupped in his hand, lay snug in the velvet-lined pocket.

At Sixth Avenue, where the great skeleton of the Elevated stalks mid-street, like a prehistoric pithecanthropus erectus, he paused for an instant in the shadow of a gigantic black pillar, readjusting the fragile burden to his pocket.

Stepping out to cross the street, simultaneously a great silent motor-car, noiseless but wild with speed, tore down the surface-car tracks, blacker in the hulking shadow of the Elevated trellis.

A quick doubling up of the sagging silhouette, and the groan of a clutch violently thrown.  A woman’s shriek flying thin and high like a javelin of horror.  A crowd sprung full grown out of the bog of the morning.  White, peering faces showing up in the brilliant paths of the acetylene lamps.  A uniform pushing through.  A crowbar and the hard breathing of men straining to lift.  A sob in the dark.  Stand back!  Stand back!

* * * * *

Dawn—­then a blue, wintry sky, the color and hardness of enamel; and sunshine, bright, yet so far off the eye could stare up to it unsquinting.  It lay against the pink-brocaded window-hangings of the suite in the Hotel Metropolis; it even crept in like a timid hand reaching toward, yet not quite touching, the full-flung figure of Mrs. Blutch Connors, lying, her cheek dug into the harshness of the carpet, there at the closed door to the bedroom—­prone as if washed there, and her yellow hair streaming back like seaweed.  Sobs came, but only the dry kind that beat in the throat and then come shrilly, like a sheet of silk swiftly torn.

How frail are human ties, have said the beaux esprits of every age in one epigrammatic fashion or another.  But frailty can bleed; in fact, it’s first to bleed.

Lying there, with her face swollen and stamped with the carpet-nap, squirming in a grief that was actually abashing before it was heartbreaking, Ann ’Lisbeth Connors, whose only epiphany of life was love, and shut out from so much else that helps make life sweet, was now shut out from none of its pain.

Once she scratched at the door, a faint, dog-like scratch for admission, and then sat back on her heels, staring at the uncompromising panel, holding back the audibility of her sobs with her hand.