“But I’m not so old.”

She looked at him critically.  “No—­you’re not.  It always puzzled me.  You aren’t old—­you look like a boy lots of the time.  But you always seem old to me.”

“I’ll try to do better.  To-night?”

“Not to-night,” laughed she.  “Let’s see—­to-morrow’s Sunday.  Come to-morrow—­about half past two.”

“Thank you,” he said so gratefully that he cursed himself for his folly as he heard his voice—­the idiotic folly of so plainly betraying his feelings.  No wonder she despised him!  Beginning again—­and beginning; wrong.

“Good-by.”  Her eyes, her smile flashed and he was alone, watching her slender grace glide through the throngs of lower Broadway.

At his office again at three, he found a note from Tetlow inclosing another of Dorothy’s cards and also the promised check.  Into his face came the look that always comes into the faces of the prisoners of despair when the bolts slide back and the heavy door swings and hope stands on the threshold instead of the familiar grim figure of the jailer.  “This looks like the turn of the road,” he muttered.  Yes, a turn it certainly was—­but was it the turn?  “I’ll know more as to that,” said he with a glance at the clock, “about this time to-morrow.”

* * * * *

It was a boarding house on the west side.  And when the slovenly, smelly maid said, “Go right up to her room,” he knew it was—­probably respectable, but not rigidly respectable.  However, working girls must receive, and they cannot afford parlors and chaperons.  Still—­It was no place for a lovely young girl, full of charm and of love of life—­and not brought up in the class where the women are trained from babyhood to protect themselves.

He ascended two flights, knocked at the door to the rear.  “Come!” called a voice, and he entered.  It was a small neat room, arranged comfortably and with some taste.  He recognized at first glance many little things from her room in the Jersey City house—­things he had provided for her.  On the chimney piece was a large photograph of her father—­Norman’s eyes hastily shifted from that.  The bed was folded away into a couch—­for space and for respectability.  At first he did not see her.  But when he advanced a step farther, she was disclosed in the doorway of a deep closet that contained a stationary washstand.

He had never seen her when she was not fully dressed.  He was now seeing her in a kind of wrapper—­of pale blue, clean but not fresh.  It was open at the throat; its sleeves fell away from her arms.  And, to cap the climax of his agitation, her hair, her wonderful hair, was flowing loosely about her face and shoulders.

“What’s the matter with you?” she cried laughingly.  Her eyes sparkled and danced; the waves of her hair, each hair standing out as if it were alive, sparkled and danced.  It was a smile never to be forgotten.  “Why are you so embarrassed?”