elevator boy.

"I said, 'Seventh,'" she smiled at him.

She was met at the door by Maida with her hair in curl papers and a
most prodigious yawning and rubbing of eyes. The ideal night life for
Maida was that spent comfortably in bed.

"Thought you'd eloped," she ventured sleepily and then turned and
shuffled off to the inner room. At the door she called over her
shoulder, "There's a note someone left for you--about two hours ago."

Mary Louise looked on the table and, lying on a pile of magazines and
newspaper supplements, was a plain, thin, white envelope. She picked
it up and looked at it curiously, wondering from whom it could be.
There was no address. She tore it open and read, and as she read she
reached over one hand and steadied herself against the table. The note
was from Joe, and laconic:

"They phoned me this evening your Aunt Susie had
had another stroke. They said you had better come."

That was all it said. There was no expression of regret. There was no
offer of help. She had a sudden rush of anxiety. But behind the
anxious feeling was one of wonder and a tiny one of hurt. She laid the
letter down upon the table and slowly and thoughtfully took off her
hat.

CHAPTER V

Things had changed for Joe. It was as though he had been told that he
had not amounted to much, that what he had come from had not amounted
to much, and that in all probability he would never amount to much.
Just how much had actually been suggested to him, and how much he had
supplied out of the whole cloth of his imagination it is doubtful if
even he could have said.

It was not the weather certainly. For the morning of the second day of
May opened wide with promise. There was a lightness about the air and
a clarity as Joe emerged from his lodging house from the ready-made
breakfast which they doled out as though breakfasts were just like
linen and towels and soap. The day would have made countless
insinuations to a normal man. To some, it said golf; to others, a
motor trip out to where a plethora of such bounties as it suggested
might be available; and to others less fortunate--why, there was the
"Ferry" just opening to hesitant crowds, with its band stand, its
scenic railway, its forty-five minutes of vaudeville that was anything
but mentally exhausting. It was an eloquent morning. But Joe turned a
deaf ear.

His walk to the factory lay for a short distance along a pretty little
park where, when the weathe