to come?"

This did not follow, to K.'s mind. They had rather a heated argument
over it, and became much better acquainted.

"If I were engaged to him," Sidney ended, her cheeks very pink, "I--I
might understand. But, as I am not--"

"Ah!" said K., a trifle unsteadily. "So you are not?"

Only a week--and love was one of the things she had had to give up, with
others. Not, of course, that he was in love with Sidney then. But he had
been desperately lonely, and, for all her practical clearheadedness,
she was softly and appealingly feminine. By way of keeping his head, he
talked suddenly and earnestly of Mrs. McKee, and food, and Tillie, and
of Mr. Wagner and the pencil pad.

"It's like a game," he said. "We disagree on everything, especially
Mexico. If you ever tried to spell those Mexican names--"

"Why did you think I was engaged?" she insisted.

Now, in K.'s walk of life--that walk of life where there are no
toothpicks, and no one would have believed that twenty-one meals could
have been secured for five dollars with a ticket punch thrown in--young
girls did not receive the attention of one young man to the exclusion of
others unless they were engaged. But he could hardly say that.

"Oh, I don't know. Those things get in the air. I am quite certain, for
instance, that Reginald suspects it."

"It's Johnny Rosenfeld," said Sidney, with decision. "It's horrible, the
way things get about. Because Joe sent me a box of roses--As a matter
of fact, I'm not engaged, or going to be, Mr. Le Moyne. I'm going into a
hospital to be a nurse."

Le Moyne said nothing. For just a moment he closed his eyes. A man is in
a rather a bad way when, every time he closes his eyes, he sees the
same thing, especially if it is rather terrible. When it gets to a point
where he lies awake at night and reads, for fear of closing them--

"You're too young, aren't you?"

"Dr. Ed--one of the Wilsons across the Street--is going to help me about
that. His brother Max is a big surgeon there. I expect you've heard of
him. We're very proud of him in the Street."

Lucky for K. Le Moyne that the moon no longer shone on the low gray
doorstep, that Sidney's mind had traveled far away to shining floors
and rows of white beds. "Life--in the raw," Dr. Ed had said that other
afternoon. Closer to her than the hospital was life in the raw that
night.

So, even here, on this quiet street in this distant city, there was
to be no peace. Max Wilson just