“You bet I can!” she said; “I’ll give you a good supper:  you just wait!” In her pretty, laughing face was very honest friendliness.  “I ’ain’t forgot that time you handed it out to Batty!  He had a bruise on his chin for a week!”

“A steak!” he exclaimed, watching her preparations in the tiny closet of a kitchen that opened into her parlor.

She nodded:  “Ain’t it luck to have it in the house?  A friend of mine gave it to me this afternoon; her father’s a butcher; and he’s got a dandy shop on the next block; an’ Annie run in with it, an’ she says” (Lily was greasing her broiler), “‘there,’ she says, ’is a present for you!’”

Maurice insisted upon helping, and was told where to get the dishes and what to put on the table, and that if he opened that closet he’d see the beer.  “I got just one bottle,” she said, chuckling; “Batty stocked up.  When he lit out, that was all he left behind him.”

“Seen him lately?” Maurice asked.

Lily’s face changed.  “I ’ain’t seen—­anyone, since November,” she said; “I’m a saleslady at Marston’s.  But I’ll have to get out of this flat when Batty’s lease runs out.  He took it by the year.  He was going to ‘settle down,’ and ’have a home,’—­you know the talk?  So he took it for the year.  Well, he said I could stay till June.  So I’m staying.  There!  It’s done!” She put the sizzling steak on a platter and pressed butter and pepper and salt into it with an energetic knife and fork.  “I bet,” she said, “you wouldn’t get a better steak than this at the Mercer House!”

“I bet I wouldn’t get one as good,” he assured her.

As he ate his extremely well-cooked steak, and drank a cup of extremely well-made coffee, and reflected that the pretty, amber-eyed woman who, after the manner of her kind, had already dropped into the friendliness of a nickname, and who waited on him with a sweet deftness, was a reformed character, owing, no doubt, to his own efforts, Maurice, comfortable in mind and body, felt the intense pleasure of punishing Eleanor by his mere presence in Lily’s rooms.  For, if she could know where he was!...  “Gosh!” said Maurice.  But of course she never would know.  He wouldn’t think of telling her where he had spent his evening; which shows how far they had drifted apart since that night when he had come home in his shirt sleeves, and been so eager to tell her how he had given his coat to the “poor thing”!

No; if he told Eleanor of Lily, now, there would be no sympathy for a girl who was really trying to keep straight; no impulse to do any “uplift” work!  For that matter, Lily could do something in the way of uplift for Eleanor! ...  Look at this tidy, gay little room, and the well-cooked steak, and the bulbs on the window sill!  He strolled over and looked at the row of purple hyacinth glasses, full now of threadlike roots and topped with swelling buds.  “You’re quite a gardener,” he said.

“Well, there!” said Lily; “if I hadn’t but ten cents, I’d spend five for a flower!”