f--"

"Well, promise to do nothing rash before I come home."

"Promises made for keeps are specifically prohibited by article nine
of the Social Pirate's Letters of Marque. But I don't mind telling you
the chances are you'll find me on the roof when you get back, unless
this heat lets up. I'm going up now; this place is simply
suffocating!"

But her smile grew dim as she resigned herself to an evening whose
loneliness promised to be unbroken; that faint flush faded which had
crept into her cheeks in the course of her half-whimsical,
half-serious harangue; she looked once more what life had made her--a
work-worn shop-girl, of lack-lustre charm, on the verge of prematurely
middle-aged, hopeless spinsterhood.

Another six months of this life would break her, body and spirit,
beyond repair.

Her eyes, that ranged the confines of those mean quarters, darkened
quickly with their expression of jaded discontent.

Another six months? She felt as if she could not suffer another six
hours. . . .

After a time she rose and moved languidly out into the hall, from
which an iron ladder led up through a scuttle to the roof, the refuge
and retreat of the studio's tenants on those breathless, interminable
summer nights when their quarters were unendurably stuffy. Here they
were free to lounge at ease, _en deshabille_; neither the dressmaker
nor the teacher of voice-production ever troubled their privacy, and
seldom did other figures appear on any of the roofs which ran to the
Park Avenue corner on an exact plane broken only by low dividing walls
and chimney-stacks.

Three chairs of the steamer type, all maimed, comprised the furniture
of this roof-garden, with (by way of local colour) on one of the
copings a row of four red clay flower-pots filled with sun-baked dust
from which gnarled and rusty stalks thrust themselves up like withered
elfin limbs.

Selecting the soundest chair, Sally dragged it into the shadow cast by
the hood of the studio top-light, and settling down with her feet on
the adjacent coping, closed her eyes and sought to relax from her
temper of high, almost hysterical nervous tension.

Thoughts bred of her talk with Lucy for a time distracted her,
blending into incoherent essays at imaginative adventures staged in
the homes and parks of the wealthy, as pictured by the sycophantic
fashion magazine and cast with the people of its gallery of
photographs--sublimely smart women in frocks of marvellous
inspirat