t at all as she had fled on
her other perilous enterprise only yesterday. She shut the outer door
after her without a sound and with great relief breathed in the fresh
and faintly smoky air of morning.

She walked quickly. The windows of her house still overlooked her, and
her greatest terror was that some voice, some appearance, out of that
house, might command her return. The street was nearly empty. A maid
scrubbing down steps looked after her sharply, and she wondered if she
had been recognized. She had no intention of keeping to this street, or
even taking a car and traveling down its broad, gray and gleaming vista
of formal houses and formal gardens that she knew and that knew her so
well. It was a cross-town car bound for quite another locality that she
climbed aboard. It was filled only with mechanics and workmen with picks
and shovels. She sat crowded elbow to elbow among odors of stale
tobacco, stale garlic, stale perspiration, and looking straight before
her through the car window watched the aspect of the city, still gray,
grow less gleaming and formal and finally quite dirty, and quite, quite
dull.

This was all as she had intended, very much in the direction of her
errand, and safe. But in Market Street the car-line ended, and she was
turned out again in this broad artery of commerce where she was in
danger of meeting at any moment people she knew. She made straight
across the thoroughfare to its south side, turned down Eighteenth and in
a moment was hidden in Mission Street.

Now really the worst danger of detection was over. She saw no reason why
a woman with a small hat and a hand-bag should not pass for a
school-teacher. Indeed, the men did let her go at that, but the
women--women with shawls over their heads, and women with uncovered
heads and ear-rings in their ears, and thin, weak-eyed women with bags
in their hands--the teachers themselves, one of whom she hoped to pass
for--all stared at her. It didn't matter much, she thought, whether they
thought her queer or not since they couldn't stop her.

She went, glancing at windows as she passed, looking for a place where
she could go to breakfast. She turned into the first restaurant that
offered, and after a hasty glance around it to be sure no one lurked
there that might betray her she subsided into the clatter with relief.
It was one more place to let time pass in, for it would be full two
hours before she could fulfil her errand. She stayed as l