“That’s a fact,” chuckled the old fellow.  “They ain’t stood under no dove of peace yet; they’re just about ready to now, I reckon.”

* * * * *

And up through the lane, all oblivious, the lovers were walking slowly.  Just before they reached the gap in the wall, they paused by common consent.  Cherry and apple trees drooped over the wall; these had ceased blossoming, but a tangle of wild-rose bushes was all ablush.  It dropped a thick harvest of petals on the ground.  Joe bent his head; and Esther, resting against his shoulder, lifted her eyes to his face.  All unconsciously she took the pose of the woman in the Frohman poster.  They kissed, and then went on slowly.

Cordelia’s Night of Romance

BY JULIAN RALPH

Cordelia Angeline Mahoney was dressing, as she would say, “to keep a date” with a beau, who would soon be waiting on the corner nearest her home in the Big Barracks tenement-house.  She smiled as she heard the shrill catcall of a lad in Forsyth Street.  She knew it was Dutch Johnny’s signal to Chrissie Bergen to come down and meet him at the street doorway.  Presently she heard another call—­a birdlike whistle—­and she knew which boy’s note it was, and which girl it called out of her home for a sidewalk stroll.  She smiled, a trifle sadly, and yet triumphantly.  She had enjoyed herself when she was no wiser and looked no higher than the younger Barracks girls, who took up the boys of the neighborhood as if there were no others.

She was in her own little dark inner room, which she shared with only two others of the family, arranging a careful toilet by kerosene-light.  The photograph of herself in trunks and tights, of which we heard in the story of Elsa Muller’s hopeless love, was before her, among several portraits of actresses and salaried beauties.  She had taken them out from under the paper in the top drawer of the bureau.  She always kept them there, and always took them out and spread them in the lamp-light when she was alone in her room.  She glanced approvingly at the portrait of herself as a picture of which she had said to more than one girlish confidante that it showed as neat a figure and as perfectly shaped limbs as any actress’s she had ever seen.  But the suggestion of a frown flitted across her brow as she thought how silly she was to have once been “stage-struck”—­how foolish to have thought that mere beauty could quickly raise a poor girl to a high place on the stage.  Julia Fogarty’s case proved that.  Julia and she were stage-struck together, and where was Julia—­or Corynne Belvedere, as she now called herself?  She started well as a figurante in a comic opera company up-town, but from that she dropped to a female minstrel troupe in the Bowery, and now, Lewy Tusch told Cordelia, she was “tooing ter skirt-tance in ter pickernic parks for ter sick-baby fund, ant passin’ ter hat arount afterwarts.”  And evil was being whispered of her—­a pretty high price to pay for such small success; and it must be true, because she sometimes came home late at night in cabs, which are devilish, except when used at funerals.