nnermost bleeding, sagged suddenly,
thinning and trickling back into the great, impersonal maw of the city.
Apart from the rush of the exodus, a youth remained at the rail, gazing
out and quivering for the smell of war. Finally, he too, turned back
reluctantly.

Now only Mrs. Ross. An hour she stood there, a solitary figure at the rail,
holding to her large black hat, her skirts whipped to her body and snapping
forward in the breeze. The sun struck off points from the water, animating
it with a jewel-dance. It found out in a flash the diamond-and-sapphire top
to her gold-mesh hand-bag, hoppity-skippiting from facet to facet.

"My boy--my little boy!"

A pair of dock-hands, wiping their hands on cotton-waste, came after a
while to the door of the pier-house to observe and comment. Conscious of
that observation, she moved then through the great dank sheds in and among
the bales and boxes, down a flight of stairs and out to the cobbled
street. Her motor-car, the last at the entrance, stood off at a slant,
the chauffeur lopping slightly and dozing, his face scarcely above the
steering-wheel. She passed him with unnecessary stealth, her heels
occasionally wedging between the cobbles and jerking her up. Two hours she
walked thus, invariably next to the water's edge or in the first street
running parallel to it. Truck-drivers gazed at and sang after her. Deck-
and dock-hands, stretched out in the first sun of spring, opened their eyes
to her passing, often staring after her under lazy lids. Behind a drawn
veil her lips were moving, but inaudibly now. Motor-trucks, blocks of them,
painted the gray of war, stood waiting shipment, engines ready to throb
into no telling what mire. Once a van of knitted stuffs, always the gray,
corded and bound into bales, rumbled by, close enough to graze and send her
stumbling back. She stood for a moment watching it lumber up alongside a
dock.

It was dusk when she emerged from the rather sinister end of West Street
into Battery Park, receding in a gracious new-green curve from the water.
Tier after tier of lights had begun to prick out in the back-drop of
skyscraping office-buildings. The little park, after the six-o'clock
stampede, settled back into a sort of lamplit quiet, dark figures, the
dregs of a city day, here and there on its benches. The back-drop of
office-lights began to blink out then, all except the tallest tower in the
world, rising in the glory of its own spotlight into a roc