Pausing for a moment on the corner, she watched curiously the faces moving under the electric lights, and she found herself wondering presently if each man or woman in the crowd was loving and hating or seeking an escape from both love and hatred?  A stout man wearing a red necktie, a pretty woman in a purple coat, a pale girl carrying a heavy bundle, a bent shouldered clerk who walked with a satisfied and affected air—­as each one passed she saw his features and even his hidden thoughts in a grotesque clearness which seemed to come partly from an illumination within herself and partly from the glare of the lights without.  “The man in the red necktie is happy because he has made money; the pretty woman is happy because she is loved—­but the pale girl and the bent shouldered clerk are wretched.  They have neither love nor money, and they have not found out how little either is worth.”

For a while she watched them, almost forgetting her own unhappiness in the excitement of their discovered histories; but wearying suddenly, she turned away and entered a street where the darkness had already gathered.  Here she came close upon a pair of lovers who walked arm in arm, but the sight irritated her so she turned again at the next corner.  The question whether she should go home or not thrust itself upon her, and it seemed to her that it would be better to die in the street than to return to the persuasions of Gerty, the reproaches of Mrs. Payne, and the complacency of Kemper.  As she hurried on in the darkness she saw her past as distinctly as if her eyes were turned backward, and in this vision of it there showed to her the steep upward way of the spirit, and she remembered the day when her destiny had seemed to lie mapped out for her in the hand of God.  “Was this what God meant?” she demanded, and because there was no answer to the question she asked it again and again the more passionately.  “Or perhaps there is no God after all,” she added.

A sob broke from her lips, and a policeman, who was passing, threw first an enquiring, then a respectful glance at her, and went on again.  A child playing in the street ran up to beg for some money, and she opened her bag and gave him a piece of silver with a smile.

“Thank you, lady,” he responded, and ran back into the shadows.  As he crossed the street she followed him with her eyes, seeing him hasten, his palm outstretched, to an Italian who was roasting chestnuts in a charcoal burner on the opposite sidewalk.

The darkness had grown heavier and as she walked rapidly through streets which she did not know, her nervous energy failed her, and she began to tremble presently from exhaustion.  Again she asked herself for the last time if it were possible for her to go home and face Mrs. Payne and Gerty and marry Kemper in three days.  A fantastic humour in the situation brought a laugh to her lips—­for whenever she was confronted by the hopelessness of her escape, the