t woman.

Doctor Reefy did not see the woman he had held in his
arms again until after her death. On the summer
afternoon in the office when he was on the point of
becoming her lover a half grotesque little incident
brought his love-making quickly to an end. As the man
and woman held each other tightly heavy feet came
tramping up the office stairs. The two sprang to their
feet and stood listening and trembling. The noise on
the stairs was made by a clerk from the Paris Dry Goods
Company. With a loud bang he threw an empty box on the
pile of rubbish in the hallway and then went heavily
down the stairs. Elizabeth followed him almost
immediately. The thing that had come to life in her as
she talked to her one friend died suddenly. She was
hysterical, as was also Doctor Reefy, and did not want
to continue the talk. Along the street she went with
the blood still singing in her body, but when she
turned out of Main Street and saw ahead the lights of
the New Willard House, she began to tremble and her
knees shook so that for a moment she thought she would
fall in the street.

The sick woman spent the last few months of her life
hungering for death. Along the road of death she went,
seeking, hungering. She personified the figure of death
and made him now a strong black-haired youth running
over hills, now a stem quiet man marked and scarred by
the business of living. In the darkness of her room she
put out her hand, thrusting it from under the covers of
her bed, and she thought that death like a living thing
put out his hand to her. "Be patient, lover," she
whispered. "Keep yourself young and beautiful and be
patient."

On the evening when disease laid its heavy hand upon
her and defeated her plans for telling her son George
of the eight hundred dollars hidden away, she got out
of bed and crept half across the room pleading with
death for another hour of life. "Wait, dear! The boy!
The boy! The boy!" she pleaded as she tried with all of
her strength to fight off the arms of the lover she had
wanted so earnestly.

* * *

Elizabeth died one day in March in the year when her
son George became eighteen, and the young man had but
little sense of the meaning of her death. Only time
could give him that. For a month he had seen her lying
white and still and speechless in her bed, and then one
afternoon the doctor stopped him in the hallway and
said a few words.

The young man went into his own