ky."

Tillie rose and tied a gingham apron over her white one.

"I guess so. Only sometimes--"

"I don't know as it would have been so wrong. He ain't young, and I
ain't. And we're not getting any younger. He had nice manners; he'd have
been good to me."

Mrs. McKee's voice failed her. For a moment she gasped like a fish.
Then:

"And him a married man!"

"Well, I'm not going to do it," Tillie soothed her. "I get to thinking
about it sometimes; that's all. This new fellow made me think of him.
He's got the same nice way about him."

Aye, the new man had made her think of him, and June, and the lovers
who lounged along the Street in the moonlit avenues toward the park and
love; even Sidney's pink roses. Change was in the very air of the Street
that June morning. It was in Tillie, making a last clutch at youth, and
finding, in this pale flare of dying passion, courage to remember what
she had schooled herself to forget; in Harriet asserting her right to
live her life; in Sidney, planning with eager eyes a life of service
which did not include Joe; in K. Le Moyne, who had built up a wall
between himself and the world, and was seeing it demolished by a
deaf-and-dumb book agent whose weapon was a pencil pad!

And yet, for a week nothing happened: Joe came in the evenings and sat
on the steps with Sidney, his honest heart, in his eyes. She could not
bring herself at first to tell him about the hospital. She put it off
from day to day. Anna, no longer sulky, accepted wit the childlike faith
Sidney's statement that "they'd get along; she had a splendid scheme,"
and took to helping Harriet in her preparations for leaving. Tillie,
afraid of her rebellious spirit, went to prayer meeting. And K. Le
Moyne, finding his little room hot in the evenings and not wishing to
intrude on the two on the doorstep, took to reading his paper in the
park, and after twilight to long, rapid walks out into the country. The
walks satisfied the craving of his active body for exercise, and tired
him so he could sleep. On one such occasion he met Mr. Wagner, and they
carried on an animated conversation until it was too dark to see the
pad. Even then, it developed that Wagner could write in the dark; and
he secured the last word in a long argument by doing this and striking a
match for K. to read by.

When K. was sure that the boy had gone, he would turn back toward the
Street. Some of the heaviness of his spirit always left him at sight of
th