in his arms; she
was whispering, "My heart is so lonely;" and the room was still. The low
sun flooded the windows, swam in the mirror in the hall, but they did
not heed, did not see its gliding glory.

Not till there was a sound of footsteps did she burst from his arms,
spring to her reflection in the glass of a picture, and shamefacedly
murmur to him over her shoulder, "My hair--it's a terrible giveaway!"

He had followed her; he stood with his arm circling her shoulder.

She begged, "No. Please no. I'm frightened. Let's--oh, let's have a walk
or something before you scamper home."

"Look! My dear! Let's run away, and explore the town, and not come back
till late evening."

"Yes. Let's."

They walked from Queen Anne Hill through the city to the docks. There
was nothing in their excited, childish, "Oh, see that!" and "There's a
dandy car!" and "Ohhhhh, that's a Minnesota license--wonder who it is?"
to confess that they had been so closely, so hungrily together.

They swung along a high walk overlooking the city wharf. They saw a
steamer loading rails and food for the government railroad in Alaska.
They exclaimed over a nest of little, tarry fishing-boats. They watched
men working late to unload Alaska salmon.

They crossed the city to Jap Town and its writhing streets, its dark
alleys and stairways lost up the hillsides. They smiled at black-eyed
children, and found a Japanese restaurant, and tried to dine on raw fish
and huge shrimps and roots soaked in a very fair grade of light-medium
motor oil.

With Milt for guide, Claire discovered a Christianity that was not of
candles and shifting lights and insinuating music, nor of carpets and
large pews and sound oratory, but of hoboes blinking in rows, and girls
in gospel bonnets, and little silver and crimson placards of Bible
texts. They stopped on a corner to listen to a Pentecostal brother, to
an I. W. W. speaker, to a magnificent negro who boomed in an operatic
baritone that the Day of Judgment was coming on April 11, 1923, at three
in the morning.

In the streets of Jap Town, in cheap motion-picture theaters, in hotels
for transient workmen, she found life, running swift and eager and
many-colored; and it seemed to her that back in the house of
four-posters and walls of subdued gray, life was smothered in the very
best pink cotton-batting. Milt's delight in every picturesque dark
corner, and the colloquial eloquence of the street-orators, stirred her.
And