"You cain't. I
cain't, neither. None of us cain't," he added as an afterthought.

Laurie slowly walked away. His thoughts scampered around and around,
like squirrels in a cage. The return of the basket, of course, might
mean either of two conditions--that the girl was too proud to accept
help, or that she was really in no need of it. Laurie had met a few art
students. He knew that, hungry or not, almost any one of them would
cheerfully have taken in that basket and consumed its contents. He had
built on that knowledge in providing it. If the girl _had_ taken it in,
the fact would have proved nothing. Her refusal to touch it was
suspicious. It swung the weight of evidence toward the elevator boy's
starvation theory.

Laurie's thoughts returned to that imaginative youth. He saw him
consuming the girl's luncheon, and a new suspicion crossed his mind.
Perhaps the whole business was a bit of graft. But his intelligence
rejected that suggestion. If this had been the explanation, the boy
would not have concluded the episode so briskly. He had got the strange
young man where he might have "kept him going" for days and made a good
income in the process. As it was, there seemed nothing more to do. And
yet--and yet--how the deuce could one let the thing drop like that? If
the girl was really in straits--

Thus the subconscious argument went on and on. It worried Laurie. He was
not used to such violent mental exercise. Least of all was he in the
habit of disturbing himself about the affairs of others. But this affair
was different. The girl was so pretty! Also, he had recurrent visions of
his sister Barbara in the position of his mysterious neighbor. Barbara
might easily have gone through such an experience during last year's
test in New York. In that same experiment Laurie himself had learned how
slender is the plank that separates one from the abyss that lies beneath
the world's workers.

He dined alone that night and it was well he did so. His lack of
appetite would certainly have attracted the attention of Bangs or any
other fellow diner, and Bangs would as certainly have commented upon it.
Also, he passed a restless night, troubled by vaguely depressing dreams.
The girl was in them, but everything was as hopelessly confused as his
daytime mental processes had been.

The next morning he deliberately kept away from the mirror until he was
fully dressed, but he dressed with a feeling of tenseness and urgency he
would have f