He rushed from the table, strangling, stuttering, staggering; and his face was twisted with fear.

For an hour she sat there, waiting, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes growing larger in her face.  The dish of stew took on a thin coating of grease and the beer died in the glass.  The waiter snickered.  After a while she paid for the meal out of her newly opened wage-envelope and walked out into the air.

Once on the street, she moaned audibly into her handkerchief.  There is relief in articulation.  Her way lay through dark streets where figures love to slink in the shadows.  One threw a taunt at her and she ran.  At the stoop of her rooming-house she faltered, half fainting and breathing deep from exhaustion, her head thrown back and her eyes gazing upward.

Over the narrow street stars glittered, dozens and myriads of them.

* * * * *

Literature has little enough to say of the heartaches and the heartburns of the Sara Jukes and the Hattie Krakows and the Eddie Blaneys.  Medical science concedes them a hollow organ for keeping up the circulation.  Yet Mrs. Van Ness’s heartbreak over the death of her Chinese terrier, Wang, claims a first-page column in the morning edition; her heartburn—­a complication of midnight terrapin and the strain of her most recent role of corespondent—­obtains her a suite de luxe in a private sanitarium.

Vivisectionists believe the dog is less sensitive to pain than man; so the social vivisectionists, in problem plays and best sellers, are more concerned with the heartaches and heartburns of the classes.  But analysis would show that the sediment of salt in Sara Juke’s and Mrs. Van Ness’s tears is equal.

Indeed, when Sara Juke stepped out of the streetcar on a golden Sunday morning in October, her heart beat higher and more full of emotion than Mrs. Van Ness could find at that breakfast hour, reclining on her fine linen pillows, an electric massage and a four-dollars-an-hour masseuse forcing her sluggish blood to flow.

Eddie Blaney gently helped Sara to alight, cupping the point of her elbow in his hand; and they stood huddled for a moment by the roadway while the car whizzed past, leaving them in the yellow and ocher, saffron and crimson, countryside.

“Gee!  Gee whiz!”

“See!  I told you.  And you not wanting to come when I called for you this morning—­you trying to dodge me and the swellest Indian-summer Sunday on the calendar!”

“Looka!”

“Wait!  We ’ain’t started yet, if you think this is swell.”

“Oh!  Let’s go over in them woods.  Let’s.”  Her lips were apart and pink crept into her cheeks, effacing the dark rims of pain beneath her eyes.

“Let’s hurry.”

“Sure; that’s where we’re going—­right over in there, where the woods look like they’re on fire; but, gee! this ain’t nothing to the country places I know round here.  This ain’t nothing.  Wait!”