.

What we found out the next day, when we filed into the superintendent's
office with the ill-dressed horde of anxious Sunday-afternoon visitors,
was hardly a surprise. We expected nothing but what Eunice had predicted
from the first. Bessie had died the night before--died murmuring about
poppies, the young doctor told us.

"She's better off where she is than she'd be down at Wolff's," said
Eunice, as we passed through the gates on to the street again. I made
no comment, and we walked silently away from the big, ugly brick pile
that holds such horrors for the poor. When we reached Third Avenue,
Eunice stopped before a florist's window, and we looked in at a cluster
of great white lilies. Neither spoke, however, and in a moment we passed
on down Third Avenue, now brightly lighted and teeming with its usual
gay Sunday night crowd. At last we turned into our own street, and were
in front of the dark building we both called "home." Here Eunice caught
my hand in hers, with a convulsive little motion, as might a child who
was afraid of the dark. We climbed the stone steps together, and I
pulled the bell, Eunice's grasp on my hand growing tighter and tighter.

"Good-by; it's no use," she whispered suddenly, dropping my hand and
moving away as we heard the matron fumbling at the lock; and before I
could utter a word of protest, before I could reach forward and snatch
her from some dread thing, I knew not what, she had disappeared among
the shadows of the lamplit street.

"Where's the other girl?" asked the matron.

"I don't know," I replied,--nor have I since been able to find the
faintest clue to her whereabouts, if living, or her fate, if dead. From
that moment at the door-step when she said good-by, Eunice stepped out
of my life as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed her
up. Is she dead or alive? Did the unhappy girl seek self-destruction
that June night, or was she swept into that great, black whirlpool, the
name of which even a girl of the workaday world mentions always with
bated breath? I do not know. I never expect to know the fate of Eunice.
It is only in stories that such things are made clear, usually, and this
was only an incident in real life.

XV

I BECOME A "SHAKER" IN A STEAM-LAUNDRY

The next day, Monday, they buried Bessie in a big, shabby Jewish
cemetery out on Long Island. I did not follow my comrade to the grave.
Nor did I go to work. All that long, beautiful June day was