h became the world to
the other, and love, death-strong, shot their hearts.

He turned, gazing strangely at her pale, eager, breathless face.

"I want ..." he began.

"Yes," she breathed.

He opened his lips, and the sound that escaped seemed like a sob.

"Myra!"

And then at the sound of her name she was all woman, all love. She cried
out:

"Joe!"

And they flung their arms round each other. She sobbed there, overcome
with the yearning, the glory, the beatitude of that moment.

"Oh," he cried, "how I love you!... Myra ..."

"Joe, Joe--I couldn't have stood it longer!"

All of life, all of the past, all of the million years of earth melted
into that moment, that moment when a man and a woman, mingled into one,
stood in the heart of the wonder, the love, the purpose of nature--a
mad, wild, incoherent half-hour, a secret ecstasy in the passing of the
twilight, in the swing of the wind and the breath of the sea.

"Come home to my mother," cried Joe. "Come home with me!"

They turned ... and Myra was a strange new woman, tender, grave, and
wrought of all lovely power, her face, in the last of the light, mellow
and softly glowing with a heightened woman-power.

"Yes," she said, "I want to see Joe's mother."

It was Joe's last step to success. Now he had all--his work, his love.
He felt powerfully masculine, triumphant, glorious.

Night had fallen, and on the darkness broke and sparkled a thousand
lights in tenement windows and up the shadowy streets--everywhere homes,
families; men, women, and children busily living together; everywhere
love. Joe glanced, his eyes filling. Then he paused.

"Look at that," he said in a changed voice.

Over against the west, a little to the north, the gray heavens were
visible--a lightning seemed to run over them--a ghastly red
lightning--sharply silhouetting the chimneyed housetops.

"What is it?" said Myra.

He gazed at it, transfixed.

"That's a fire ... a big fire." Then suddenly his face, in the pale
light of a street-lamp, became chalky white and knotted. He could barely
speak. "It must be on Eighty-first or Eighty-second Street."

She spoke shrilly, clutching his arm.

"Not ... the loft?"

"Oh, it can't be!" he cried, in an agony. "But come ... hurry ..."

They started toward Eighty-first Street up Avenue A. They walked fast;
and it seemed suddenly to Joe that he had been dancing on a thin crust,
and that the crust had broken and he was falling through. H