ING GUEST

By O. HENRY

Copyright 1907 by McClure, Phillips & Co.

One evening when Andy Donovan went to dinner at his Second Avenue
boarding-house, Mrs. Scott introduced him to a new boarder, a young
lady, Miss Conway. Miss Conway was small and unobtrusive. She wore a
plain, snuffy-brown dress, and bestowed her interest, which seemed
languid, upon her plate. She lifted her diffident eyelids and shot one
perspicuous, judicial glance at Mr. Donovan, politely murmured his
name, and returned to her mutton. Mr. Donovan bowed with the grace and
beaming smile that were rapidly winning for him social, business and
political advancement, and erased the snuffy-brown one from the tablets
of his consideration.

Two weeks later Andy was sitting on the front steps enjoying his cigar.
There was a soft rustle behind and above him, and Andy turned his
head--and had his head turned.

Just coming out the door was Miss Conway. She wore a night-black dress
of _crepe de--crepe de_--oh, this thin black goods. Her hat was black,
and from it drooped and fluttered an ebon veil, filmy as a spider's
web. She stood on the top step and drew on black silk gloves. Not a
speck of white or a spot of color about her dress anywhere. Her rich
golden hair was drawn, with scarcely a ripple, into a shining, smooth
knot low on her neck. Her face was plain rather than pretty, but it
was now illuminated and made almost beautiful by her large gray eyes
that gazed above the houses across the street into the sky with an
expression of the most appealing sadness and melancholy.

Gather the idea, girls--all black, you know, with the preference for
_crepe de_--oh, _crepe de Chine_--that's it. All black, and that sad,
faraway look, and the hair shining under the black veil (you have to be
a blonde, of course), and try to look as if, although your young life
had been blighted just as it was about to give a hop-skip-and-a-jump
over the threshold of life, a walk in the park might do you good, and
be sure to happen out the door at the right moment, and--oh, it'll
fetch 'em every time. But it's fierce, now, how cynical I am, ain't
it?--to talk about mourning costumes this way.

Mr. Donovan suddenly reinscribed Miss Conway upon the tablets of his
consideration. He threw away the remaining inch-and-a-quarter of his
cigar, that would have been good for eight minutes yet, and quickly
shifted his center of gravity to his low-cut patent leathers.

"It's a