She half awoke many times, and each time she had a vague, sweet longing which refused to resolve itself into definite shape.  But when the full morning came she knew it was Ray she wanted.  She couldn’t wait out the long week he had prescribed as a season of fasting and prayer before she gave her answer, and she was shamelessly glad when her superior, over there at the Settlement House, informed her that she would be required to go to a dance-hall at South Chicago that night—­a terrible place, which might well have been called “The Girl Trap.”  This gave Kate a legitimate excuse to ask for Ray’s company, because he had besought her not to go to such places at night without his escort.

“But ought I to be seeing you?” he asked over the telephone in answer to her request.  “Wouldn’t it be better for my cause if I stayed away?”

In spite of the fact that he laughed, she knew he was quite in earnest, and she wondered why he hadn’t discerned her compliant mood from her intonations.

“But I had to mind you, hadn’t I?” she sent back.  “You said I mustn’t go to such places without you.”

From her tone she might have been the most betendriled feminine vine that ever wrapped a self-satisfied masculine oak.

“Oh, I’ll come,” he answered.  “Of course I’ll come.  You knew you had only to give me the chance.”

He was on time, impeccable, as always, in appearance.  Kate was glad that he was as tall as she.  She knew, down in her inner consciousness, that they made a fine appearance together, that they stepped off gallantly.  It came to her that perhaps they were to be envied, and that they weren’t—­or at least that she wasn’t—­giving their good fortune its full valuation.

She told him about her dinner with the Fitzgeralds and about the opera, but she held back her discovery, so to speak, of the baby, and the episode of Marna’s wistful tears when she heard the music, and her amazing volte-face at remembering the baby’s feeding-time.  She would have loved to spin out the story to him—­she could have deepened the colors just enough to make it all very telling.  But she wasn’t willing to give away the reason for her changed mood.  It was enough, after all, that he was aware of it, and that when he drew her hand within his arm he held it in a clasp that asserted his right to keep it.

They were happy to be in each other’s company again.  Kate had to admit it.  For the moment it seemed to both of them that it didn’t matter much where they went so long as they could go together.  They rode out to South Chicago on the ill-smelling South Deering cars, crowded with men and women with foreign faces.  One of the men trod on Kate’s foot with his hobnailed shoe and gave an inarticulate grunt by way of apology.

“He’s crushed it, hasn’t he?” asked Ray anxiously, seeing the tears spring to her eyes.  “What a brute!”

“Oh, it was an accident,” Kate protested.  “Any one might have done it.”