at him, it was only because he sat
so still. And when the thing had become, at last, utterly unbearable,
and he got up to go out, he managed to look at his watch first, quite in
the manner of a "commuter" with anxieties about the ten-fifty-five
train.

The northwest wind, which had been blowing icily since sundown, had
increased in violence to a gale. But he strode out of the lobby and
into the street, unaware of it. There must be a stage door somewhere, he
knew, and he meant to find it. It didn't occur to him to inquire. He'd
quite lost his sense of social being; of membership in a civilized
society. He was another Ishmael.

It took him a long time to find that door, for, as it happened, he
started around the block in the wrong direction and fruitlessly explored
two alleys before he came on the right one. But he found it at last and
pulled the door open. An intermittent roar of hand-clapping, increasing
and diminishing with the rapid rise and fall of the curtain, told him
that the performance was just over.

A doorman stopped him and asked him what he wanted.

"I want to see Mrs. Aldrich," he said, "Mrs. Rodney Aldrich."

"No such person here," said the man, and Rodney, in his rage, simply
assumed that he was lying. It didn't occur to him that Rose would have
taken another name.

He stood there a moment debating whether to attempt to force an entrance
against the doorman's unmistakable intention to stop him, and decided to
wait instead.

The decision wasn't due to common sense, but to a wish not to dissipate
his rage on people that didn't matter. He wanted it intact for Rose.

He went back into the alley, braced himself in the angle of a brick pier
and waited. He neither stamped his feet nor flailed his arms about to
drive off the cold. He just stood still with the patience of his
immemorial ancestor, waiting. Unconscious of the lapse of time,
unconscious of the figures that presently began straggling out of the
narrow door, that were not she.

Presently she came. A buffet of wind struck her as she closed the door
behind her, and whipped her unbuttoned ulster about, but she did not
cower under it, nor turn away--stood there finely erect, confronting it.
There was something alert about her pose--he couldn't clearly see her
face--that suggested she was expecting somebody. And then, not loud, but
very distinctly:

"Roddy," she said.

He tried to speak her name, but his dry throat denied it utterance. He
beg