a weakness, and I am sure there isn’t a brighter boy in the world.”  Around the shaft of light in the mirror a stream of sparks, like tiny comets, began to form and quiver back and forth as if they were flying.  “It’s a pity the judge can’t help me, but it wouldn’t do.  I’d never forget what happened to-day, and you can never tell when trouble like that is coming.  I’ll either make Madame give me half the profits for managing the business or I’ll go to Blakeley & Grymn at a salary of ten thousand a year.  She won’t let me go, of course, because she knows I’d take two thirds of her customers with the.  Then I’ll invest all I can save in the business until finally I am able to buy it entirely—­” An elevated train passed the corner, and while the rumble died slowly in the distance, she found herself thinking of Arthur.  “How different my life might have been if I had only stayed true to him.  That’s the happiest lot that could fall to a woman, to be loved by a man as faithful and tender as Arthur.”  For a few minutes she lay, without thought, watching the lights quiver and dance in the mirror, and listening to the faint rumble of the elevated train far up the street.  Then, just as she was falling asleep, a question flashed out of the flickering lights into her mind, and she started awake again.  “I wonder who Alice is?” she said aloud to the night.

Several weeks, later, at the end of a busy day, Gabriella stood in front of the house in London Terrace, watching her furniture as it passed across the pavement and up the flagged walk into the hail.  The yard was neglected and overgrown with dandelions and wire-grass; but an old rose-bush by the steps was in full bloom, and already Miss Polly was surveying the tangled weeds with the eye of a destroyer.

“I declare I’m just hungerin’ for flowers,” she said wistfully, following the dining-room table as far as the foot of the steps where Gabriella stood.  “The very first thing in the morning before I get breakfast, I’m goin’ to sow some mignonette and nasturtium seeds in that border along the wall, and fix some window boxes with clove pinks and sweet alyssum in ’em like your ma used to have in summer.  I reckon that’s why I was so set on this place from the first.  It looks more like Richmond in old times than it does like New York.”

Beyond the grass and weeds, over which Gabriella was gazing, the street was so quiet for the moment that it might have been one of those forgotten squares in Richmond (she had never called them blocks) where needy gentlewomen still practised “light housekeeping” in the social twilight of the last century.  Now and then a tired man or woman slouched by from work; once a newsboy stopped at the gate to shout the name of his paper in belligerent accents; and a few wagons or a clanging car passed rapidly in the direction of Broadway.  From the corner of Ninth Avenue the elevated road, which seemed to her at times the only permanent thing in her surroundings, still roared and rumbled its disturbing undercurrent in her life.