n the door,
glancing down the empty street.

That moment, to her watcher, seemed quicker than a flash yet as long
as a life-time. There she was, a stone's throw away, but utterly
unconscious of his presence: his Susy, the old Susy, and yet a new Susy,
curiously transformed, transfigured almost, by the new attitude in which
he beheld her.

In the first shock of the vision he forgot his surprise at her being in
such a place, forgot to wonder whose house she was in, or whose was
the sleepy child in her arms. For an instant she stood out from the
blackness behind her, and through the veil of the winter night, a thing
apart, an unconditioned vision, the eternal image of the woman and
the child; and in that instant everything within him was changed and
renewed. His eyes were still absorbing her, finding again the familiar
curves of her light body, noting the thinness of the lifted arm that
upheld the little boy, the droop of the shoulder he weighed on, the
brooding way in which her cheek leaned to his even while she looked
away; then she drew back, the door closed, and the street-lamp again
shone on blankness.

"But she's mine!" Nick cried, in a fierce triumph of recovery...

His eyes were so full of her that he shut them to hold in the crowding
vision.

It remained with him, at first, as a complete picture; then gradually it
broke up into its component parts, the child vanished, the strange house
vanished, and Susy alone stood before him, his own Susy, only his Susy,
yet changed, worn, tempered--older, even--with sharper shadows under
the cheek-bones, the brows drawn, the joint of the slim wrist more
prominent. It was not thus that his memory had evoked her, and he
recalled, with a remorseful pang, the fact that something in her
look, her dress, her tired and drooping attitude, suggested poverty,
dependence, seemed to make her after all a part of the shabby house in
which, at first sight, her presence had seemed so incongruous.

"But she looks poor!" he thought, his heart tightening. And instantly
it occurred to him that these must be the Fulmer children whom she
was living with while their parents travelled in Italy. Rumours of Nat
Fulmer's sudden ascension had reached him, and he had heard that the
couple had lately been seen in Naples and Palermo. No one had mentioned
Susy's name in connection with them, and he could hardly tell why he
had arrived at this conclusion, except perhaps because it seemed natural
that,