risk it some day, anyhow, won't we?"

The kitten purred his assent and Mary bustled over the little gas stove
humming an old love song her mother had taught her in a far-off village
in Kentucky.

CHAPTER II. TEMPTATION

Her kitchenette was a model of order and cleanliness. The carpenter
who built its neat cupboard and fitted the drawers beneath the tiny
gas range, had outdone himself in its construction. He had given the
wood-work four coats of immaculate white paint without extra charge.
Mary had insisted on paying for it, but he waved the proffered money
aside with a gesture that spoke louder than words:

"Pooh! That's nothing to what I'd like to do for you."

She was not surprised when he called the following Saturday and stood
at her door awkwardly fumbling his hat, trying to ask her to spend the
afternoon and evening at Coney Island with him. There was no mistaking
the manner in which he made this request.

She had refused him as gently as possible--a big, awkward, good-natured,
ignorant boy he was, with the eyes of a St. Bernard dog. He apologized
for his presumption and never repeated the offense.

Somehow her conquests had all been in this class.

The tall, blushing German youth from the butcher's around the corner
had been slipping extra cuts into her bundle and making awkward advances
until she caught him red-handed with a pound of lamb chops which he
failed to explain. She read him a lecture on honesty that discouraged
him. It was not so much what she said, as the way she said it, that
wounded his sensitive nature.

The ice man she had not yet entirely subdued. Tony Bonelli had the
advantage of pretending not to understand her orders of dismissal. He
merely smiled in his sad Italian way and continued to pack her ice-box
so full the lid would never close.

She was reminded at every turn tonight of these futile conquests of the
impossible. They all smelled of the back stairs and the kitchen. Her
people had been slaveholders in the old regime of southern Kentucky. A
kindly tolerant contempt for the pretensions of a servant class was bred
in the bone of her being.

And yet their tribute to her beauty had its compensations. It was the
promise of triumph when he for whom she waited should step from the
throng and lift his hat. Just how he was going to do this without a
breach of the proprieties of life, she couldn't see. It would come. It
must come. It was Fate.

In twenty minutes her coffee