call, but
when it does--"

"I can't run away." She spoke as one clinging to a former answer. "I
must stand by my dream, such as it used to be--and even such as it is."

He eyed her sadly, shook his head, and said no more. For a moment they
halted, where the path broadened on a market-place, part shade, part
luminous with golden dust. A squad of lank boys, kicking miraculously
with flat upturned soles, kept a wicker ball shining in the air, as true
and lively as a plaything on a fountain-jet. Beyond, their tiny juniors,
girls and boys knee-high, and fat tumbling babies in rainbow finery, all
hand-locked and singing, turned their circle inside out and back again,
in the dizzy graces of the "Water Wheel." Other boys, and girls still
trousered and queued like boys, played at hopscotch, in and out among
shoes that lay across the road. All traffic, even the steady trotting
coolies, fetched a lenient compass roundabout.

"Lucky Hand, Lucky Hand! Allow me to pass," begged a coffin-maker's man,
bent under a plank. "These Long-Life boards are heavy."

"Ho, Lame Chicken!" called another, blocked by the hop-scotch. He was a
brown grass-cutter, who grinned, and fondled a smoky cloth that
buzzed--some tribe of wild bees, captured far afield. "Ho, Lame Chicken!
Do not bump me. They will sting."

He came through safely; for at the same moment the musical "Cling-clank"
of a sweetmeat-seller's bell turned the game into a race. The way was
clear, also, for a tiny, aged collector of paper, flying the gay flag of
an "Exalted Literary Society," and plodding, between two great baskets,
on his pious rounds. "Revere and spare," he piped, at intervals,--
"revere and spare the Written Word!"

All the bright picture lingered with the two alien wayfarers, long after
they had passed and the sun had withdrawn from their path. In the hoary
peace of twilight,--

"What can _we_ do here?" the girl cried abruptly. "There--I never meant
to say it. But it runs in my head all the time. I work and work, to keep
it down. What can we do here?"

Heywood watched her face, set straight before them, and now more clearly
cut in the failing light. Were there only pride in those fine and
resolute lines, it might have been a face from some splendid coin, or
medal of victory.

"You work too hard," he said. "Think, instead, of all the good--"

But at that she seemed to wince.

"The good? As if there weren't dark streets and crooked children at
home! Oh, the