tance! "You're tired
of me, Maurice." He said, "Oh, damn!" She said, "I won't have you swear
at me!"

He pushed back his chair, toppled the flimsy table over, scattering all
the cards on the floor. The falling table struck her knee; she screamed;
he flung out of the room--out of the house, into the hot darkness of an
August night.... The switches were thrown....

Down on Tyler Street there had been another quarrel--as trivial as the
difference of opinion as to hard and soft lead pencils, and again human
lives were shifted from one track to another. It was Lily who ran out
into the darkness, and wandered through the streets; then strayed down
to the bridge that spanned the hurrying black water of that same river
which, two years before, had lisped and laughed under Maurice and
Eleanor's happy eyes. Lily, watching the current, thought angrily of
Batty--then a passing elbow jostled her and some one said, "Beg pardon!"
She turned and saw Maurice.

"Well, I do say!" she said; and Maurice, pausing at the voice in the
dark, began a brief, "Excuse me; I stumbled--" saw who it was, and said,
"Why, Miss Lily! How are you? I haven't seen you for an age!"

She answered with some small jocosity; then suddenly struck her little
fist on the railing. "Well, I'm just miserable; that's how I am, if you
want to know! Batty--"

Maurice frowned. "Has that pup hurt you?"

She nodded: "I don't know why I put up with him!"

"Shake him!" he advised, good-naturedly.

"I 'ain't got any other friend." She spoke with half-laughing anger;
indeed, she was so pretty and so plucky that he forgot, for a moment,
the irritation at Eleanor which had driven him out into the night, and
it came into his mind that something ought to be done for girls like
this. He remembered that Eleanor herself had said so, "Perhaps I could
do something for her?" Eleanor had said.

"She isn't bad," he thought, looking at Lily; "she's just a fool, like
all of 'em. But there ought to be some way of fishing 'em out of the
gutter, before they get to the very bottom. Maybe Eleanor could give her
a hand up?" Then he asked her about herself: Had she friends? Where did
her family live? Could she do any work? He was rather diverted by his
own philanthropy, but it seemed to him that it would be the decent thing
to advise the girl, seriously. "I'll talk to her," he thought. "Come
on!" he said; "let's hunt up some place and have something to eat."

"I ain't hungry," she said-