he siren that lured me
from you. Let the bought verse of that street peddler plead for me.
It is you only whom I can love. Let your love forgive, and I swear to
you that mine will be true 'as long as skies above are blue.'"

On the west side, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, an alley cuts
the block in the middle. It perishes in a little court in the centre
of the block. The district is theatrical; the inhabitants, the
bubbling froth of half a dozen nations. The atmosphere is Bohemian,
the language polyglot, the locality precarious.

In the court at the rear of the alley lived the candy man. At seven
o'clock he pushed his cart into the narrow entrance, rested it upon
the irregular stone slats and sat upon one of the handles to cool
himself. There was a great draught of cool wind through the alley.

There was a window above the spot where he always stopped his
pushcart. In the cool of the afternoon, Mlle. Adele, drawing card of
the Aerial Roof Garden, sat at the window and took the air. Generally
her ponderous mass of dark auburn hair was down, that the breeze
might have the felicity of aiding Sidonie, the maid, in drying
and airing it. About her shoulders--the point of her that the
photographers always made the most of--was loosely draped a
heliotrope scarf. Her arms to the elbow were bare--there were no
sculptors there to rave over them--but even the stolid bricks in
the walls of the alley should not have been so insensate as to
disapprove. While she sat thus Felice, another maid, anointed and
bathed the small feet that twinkled and so charmed the nightly Aerial
audiences.

Gradually Mademoiselle began to notice the candy man stopping to mop
his brow and cool himself beneath her window. In the hands of her
maids she was deprived for the time of her vocation--the charming
and binding to her chariot of man. To lose time was displeasing to
Mademoiselle. Here was the candy man--no fit game for her darts,
truly--but of the sex upon which she had been born to make war.

After casting upon him looks of unseeing coldness for a dozen times,
one afternoon she suddenly thawed and poured down upon him a smile
that put to shame the sweets upon his cart.

"Candy man," she said, cooingly, while Sidonie followed her impulsive
dive, brushing the heavy auburn hair, "don't you think I am
beautiful?"

The candy man laughed harshly, and looked up, with his thin jaw set,
while he wiped his forehead with a red-and-blue handkerc