“Yes.”

“Well, I tell you,” she exclaimed, noisily, “there’s plenty ladies and gen’lemen in this town that’s like that!”

Her laughter did not cease; it became louder and shriller.  It had been, until now, a mere lubrication of the conversation, helping to make her easier in Miss Tabor’s presence, but as it increased in shrillness, she seemed to be losing control of herself, as if her laughter were getting away with her; she was not far from hysteria, when it stopped with a gasp, and she sat up straight in her chair, white and rigid.

“There!” she said, listening intently.  “Ain’t that him?” Steps sounded upon the pavement below; paused for a second at the foot of the stairs; there was the snap of a match; then the steps sounded again, retreating.  She sank back in her chair limply.  “It was only some one stoppin’ to light his cigar in the entry.  It wasn’t Joe Louden’s step, anyway.”

“You know his step?” Ariel’s eyes were bent upon the woman wonderingly.

“I’d know it to-night,” was the answer, delivered with a sharp and painful giggle.  “I got plenty reason to!”

Ariel did not respond.  She leaned a little closer to the roses upon the desk, letting them touch her face, and breathing deeply of their fragrance to neutralize a perfume which pervaded the room; an odor as heavy and cheap-sweet as the face of the woman who had saturated her handkerchief with it, a scent which went with her perfectly and made her unhappily definite; suited to her clumsily dyed hair, to her soiled white shoes, to the hot red hat smothered in plumage, to the restless stub-fingered hands, to the fat, plated rings, of which she wore a great quantity, though, surprisingly enough, the large diamonds in her ears were pure, and of a very clear water.

It was she who broke the silence once more.  “Well,” she drawled, coughing genteelly at the same time, “better late than never, as the saying is.  I wonder who it is gits up all them comical sayings?” Apparently she had no genuine desire for light upon this mystery, as she continued, immediately:  “I have a gen’leman friend that’s always gittin’ ’em off. `Well,’ he says, `the best of friends must part,’ and, `Thou strikest me to the heart’—­all kinds of cracks like that.  He’s real comical.  And yet,” she went on in an altered voice, “I don’t like him much.  I’d be glad if I’d never seen him.”

The change of tone was so marked that Ariel looked at her keenly, to find herself surprised into pitying this strange client of Joe’s; for tears had sprung to the woman’s eyes and slid along the lids, where she tried vainly to restrain them.  Her face had altered too, like her voice, haggard lines suddenly appearing about the eyes and mouth as if they had just been pencilled there:  the truth issuing from beneath her pinchbeck simulations, like a tragic mask revealed by the displacement of a tawdry covering.

“I expect you think I’m real foolish,” she said, “but I be’n waitin’ so awful long—­and I got a good deal of worry on my mind till I see Mr. Louden.”