She put down her knife and fork.  Tears sprang into her eyes,—­tears of anger, he thought.

“Say, it’s no use trying to put up a bluff with me,” she cried.

“Why do you say that?” he asked.

“You know what I mean, all right.  What did you come in here for, anyway?”

“I don’t know—­I couldn’t tell you,” he answered.

The very honesty of his words seemed, for an instant, to disconcert her; and she produced a torn lace handkerchief, which she thrust in her eyes.

“Why can’t you leave me alone?” she demanded.  “I’m all right.”

If he did not at once reply, it was because of some inner change which had taken place in himself; and he seemed to see things, suddenly, in their true proportions.  He no longer feared a scene and its consequences.  By virtue of something he had cast off or taken on, he was aware of a newly acquired mastery of the situation, and by a hidden and unconscious process he had managed to get at the real woman behind the paint:  had beaten down, as it were without a siege, her defences.  And he was incomparably awed by the sight of her quivering, frightened self.

Her weeping grew more violent.  He saw the people at the next table turn and stare, heard the men laughing harshly.  For the spectacle was evidently not an uncommon one here.  She pushed away her unfinished glass, gathered up her velvet bag and rose abruptly.

“I guess I ain’t hungry after all,” she said, and started toward the door.  He turned to the waiter, who regarded him unmoved, and asked for a check.

“I’ll get it,” he said.

Hodder drew out a ten dollar bill, and told him to keep the change.  The waiter looked at him.  Some impulse moved him to remark, as he picked up the rector’s hat: 

“Don’t let her put it over you, sir.”

Hodder scarcely heard him.  He hurried up the steps and gained the pavement, and somewhere in the black shadows beyond the arc-lights he saw her disappearing down the street.  Careless of all comment he hastened on, overtook her, and they walked rapidly side by side.  Now and again he heard a sob, but she said nothing.  Thus they came to the house where the Garvins had lived, and passed it, and stopped in front of the dimly lighted vestibule of the flats next door.  In drawing the key from her bag she dropped it:  he picked it up and put it in the lock himself.  She led the way without comment up the darkened stairs, and on the landing produced another key, opened the door of her rooms, fumbled for the electric button, and suddenly the place was flooded with light.  He glanced in, and recoiled.

II

Oddly enough, the first thing he noticed in the confusion that reigned was the absence of the piano.  Two chairs were overturned, and one of them was broken; a siphon of vichy lay on the floor beside a crushed glass and two or three of the cheap ornaments that had been swept off the mantel and broken on the gaudy tiles of the hearth.  He glanced at the woman, who had ceased crying, and stood surveying the wreckage with the calmness, the philosophic nonchalance of a class that comes to look upon misfortune as inevitable.