ttle
paths down her cheeks.

A fan of pink roses, fretted with maidenhair fern and caught with a sash
of pink tulle, lay on her coarse cot coverlet, as though one of her
dreams had ventured out of its long night.

What a witch is love!

Pink leaped into Goldie's cheeks, and into her eyes the light that
passeth understanding. Life dropped its dun-colored cloak and stood
suddenly garlanded in pink, wire-stemmed roses.

She buried her face in their fragrance. She kissed a cool bud, the heart
of which was closed. She unwrapped the pink tulle sash with fingers that
were addled--like a child's at the gold cord of a candy-box--and held
the filmy streamer against her bosom in the outline of a yoke.

* * * * *

In Mrs. McCasky's boarding-house the onward march of night was as
regular as a Swiss watch with an American movement.

At nine o'clock Mr. McCasky's tin bucket grated along the hall wall,
down two flights of banisters, across the street, and through the
knee-high swinging-doors of Joe's place.

At ten o'clock the Polinis, on the third-floor back, let down their
folding-bed and shivered the chandelier in Major Florida's second-floor
back.

At eleven o'clock Mr. McCasky's tin bucket grated unevenly along the
hall wall, down two flights of banisters, across the street, and through
the knee-high swinging-doors of Joe's place.

At twelve o'clock the electric piano in Joe's place ceased to clatter
through the night like coal pouring into an empty steel bin, and Mrs.
McCasky lowered the hall light from a blob the size of a cranberry to a
French pea.

At one o'clock the next to the youngest Polini infant lifted its voice
to the skylight, and Mr. Trimp's night-key waltzed round the front-door
lock, scratch-scratching for its hole.

In the dim-lit first-floor front Mrs. Trimp started from her light doze
like a deer in a park, which vibrates to the fall of a lady's feather
fan. The criss-cross from the cane chair-back was imprinted on one
sleep-flushed cheek, and her eyes, dim with the weariness of the
night-watch, flew to the white-china door-knob.

Reader, rest undismayed. Mr. Trimp entered on the banking-hour legs of a
scholar and a gentleman. With a white carnation in his buttonhole, his
hat unbattered in the curve of his arm, and his blue eyes behind their
curtain of black lashes, but slightly watery, like a thawing ice-pond
with a film atop.

"Hello, my little Goldie-eyes!"