“How about some money on account?” questioned the writer.  “Unless I get some by tomorrow, I want my rooms vacated.”

So the ultimatum had come.  Mary Burton stood before the mirror for a moment and out of her body all the strength seemed to flow.  Her knees shook, and her hands grew moist and chilly.  Lest her sudden weakness be apparent to her mother she turned and went wearily into the other room.  There she sat on the edge of her bed and tried to think.

“Tomorrow!” She dully repeated.  “Tomorrow we are put out—­then a public asylum for my mother—­and the street or the almshouse for my father.”  Even now she was not thinking of herself.  If it came to that she still believed God would not resent her opening for herself the single door of escape.

But these two old and helpless people!  To Mary they were desperate burdens, but perhaps that only made her love them the more, and fight for them the more loyally.

For a long while she sat there in silence, then she rose with a red spot burning on each cheek and put on her hat again.  At the lower landing she encountered the landlord.  He was not a prepossessing man at best, and his face just now did not indicate that he was at his best.

“You got my note?” he inquired bluntly, and the girl nodded.

“I think,” she faltered, “probably I can do something about the rent tomorrow.”

“Thinking isn’t going to satisfy me,” he announced.  “Tomorrow’s the limit of my patience.”

Mary suddenly remembered that to telephone costs a nickel, and that she had none with her.  For a moment she stood on the sidewalk before climbing the two flights again to raid the little supply of her purse.  The endless anxiety and the unbroken strain of these calamitous months had weakened her to the point of realizing that the stairs were steep.  Then she remembered that the Italian woman at the delicatessen shop was her friend, and would trust her for the five cents.  She fought her way along to the store through a wind which threatened to sweep her off her feet and which cut her like whiplashes.

Her trembling fingers made a task of turning the pages of the directory and finding the number of a newspaper on Park row, but at last she succeeded.

“Is Mr. Smitherton there?” she asked, and the curt direction came back, “Hold the wire.”

Smitherton was sitting at a desk littered with newspaper clippings and sheaves of copy-paper.  His shirt-sleeves were rolled to the elbow and the light of his desk bulb shone on his ruffled hair as the “copy-kid” called out to him with that insouciant freshness which stamps his kind.

“Dame wants you on the wire.  Got a voice like a million-dollars worth of peaches an’ cream.”  Mary with the receiver to her ear heard the subtle compliment of those mixed metaphors.

Smitherton finished pasting a clipping into the blank place in a type-written page and rose slowly.