She had not seen him; it was nothing but a step she heard.  Yet a power, the power of the girl’s life, shook off all outward masks, all surface cloudy fancies, and stood up in her with a terrible passion at the sound; her blood burned fiercely; her soul looked out from her face, her soul as it was, as God knew it,—­God and this man.  No longer a cold, clear face; you would have thought, looking at it, what a strong spirit the soul of this woman would be, if set free in heaven or in hell.  The man who held it in his power went on carelessly, not knowing that the mere sound of his step had raised it as from the dead.  She, and her right, and her pain, were nothing to him now, she remembered, staring out at the taunting hot sky.  Yet so vacant was the sudden life opened before her when he was gone, that, in the desperation of her weakness, her mad longing to see him but once again, she would have thrown herself at his feet, and let the cold, heavy step crush her life out,—­as he would have done, she thought, choking down the icy smother in her throat, if it had served his purpose, though it cost his own heart’s life to do it.  He would trample her down, if she kept him back from his end; but be false to her, false to himself, that he would never be!

So the hot, long day wore on,—­the red bricks, the dusty desk covered with wool, the miserable chicken peering out, growing sharper and more real in the glare.  Life was no morbid nightmare now; her weak woman’s heart found it actual and near.  There was not a pain nor a want, from the dumb hunger in the dog’s eyes that passed her on the street, to her father’s hopeless fancies, that did not touch her sharply through her own loss, with a keen pity, a wild wish to help to do something to save others with this poor life left in her hands.

So the hot day wore on in the town and country; the old sun glaring down like some fierce old judge, intolerant of weakness or shams,—­baking the hard earth in the streets harder for the horses’ feet, drying up the bits of grass that grew between the boulders of the gutter, scaling off the paint from the brazen faces of the interminable brick houses.  He looked down in that city as in every American town, as in these where you and I live, on the same countless maze of human faces going day by day through the same monotonous routine.  Knowles, passing through the restless crowds, read with keen eye among them strange meanings by this common light of the sun,—­meanings such as you and I might read, if our eyes were clear as his,—­or morbid, it may be.  A commonplace crowd like this in the street without:  women with cold, fastidious faces, heavy-brained, bilious men, dapper ’prentices, draymen, prize-fighters, negroes.  Knowles looked about him as into a seething caldron, in which the people I tell you of were atoms, where the blood of uncounted races was fused, but not mingled,—­where creeds, philosophies, centuries old, grappled hand to hand in their death-struggle,—­where innumerable aims and beliefs and powers of intellect, smothered rights and triumphant wrongs, warred together, struggling for victory.