uckling; "Batty stocked up.
When he lit out, that was all he left behind him."

"Seen him lately?" Maurice asked.

Lily's face changed. "I 'ain't seen--anyone, since November," she said;
"I'm a saleslady at Marston's. But I'll have to get out of this flat
when Batty's lease runs out. He took it by the year. He was going to
'settle down,' and 'have a home,'--you know the talk? So he took it for
the year. Well, he said I could stay till June. So I'm staying. There!
It's done!" She put the sizzling steak on a platter and pressed butter
and pepper and salt into it with an energetic knife and fork. "I bet,"
she said, "you wouldn't get a better steak than this at the Mercer
House!"

"I bet I wouldn't get one as good," he assured her.

As he ate his extremely well-cooked steak, and drank a cup of extremely
well-made coffee, and reflected that the pretty, amber-eyed woman who,
after the manner of her kind, had already dropped into the friendliness
of a nickname, and who waited on him with a sweet deftness, was a
reformed character, owing, no doubt, to his own efforts, Maurice,
comfortable in mind and body, felt the intense pleasure of punishing
Eleanor by his mere presence in Lily's rooms. For, _if she could know
where he was_!... "Gosh!" said Maurice. But of course she never would
know. He wouldn't think of telling her where he had spent his evening;
which shows how far they had drifted apart since that night when he had
come home in his shirt sleeves, and been so eager to tell her how he had
given his coat to the "poor thing"!

No; if he told Eleanor of Lily, now, there would be no sympathy for a
girl who was really trying to keep straight; no impulse to do any
"uplift" work! For that matter, Lily could do something in the way of
uplift for Eleanor! ... Look at this tidy, gay little room, and the
well-cooked steak, and the bulbs on the window sill! He strolled over
and looked at the row of purple hyacinth glasses, full now of threadlike
roots and topped with swelling buds. "You're quite a gardener," he said.

"Well, there!" said Lily; "if I hadn't but ten cents, I'd spend five for
a flower!"

After they had washed the dishes together she made him comfortable in
the big chair, and even put a blossoming hyacinth on the table beside
him, so he could smell it now and then. Then she sat down on a hassock
at his feet, with her back to the fire, and, flecking off the ashes of
her cigarette over her shoulder, she talked a fri