are not to meet again, still to send you a reassuring,
trembling smile.

Ah, no, that was for yesterday; it is too late
now. He wanders the streets thinking of her to-
night, but she has forgotten him. In her great
hour the man is nothing to the woman; their love
is trivial now.

He and I were on opposite sides of the street,
now become familiar ground to both of us, and
divers pictures rose before me in which Mary
A-----walked. Here was the morning after my
only entry into her house. The agent had prom-
ised me to have the obnoxious notice-board re-
moved, but I apprehended that as soon as the
letter announcing his intention reached her she
would remove it herself, and when I passed by in
the morning there she was on a chair and a foot-
stool pounding lustily at it with a hammer. When
it fell she gave it such a vicious little kick.

There were the nights when her husband came
out to watch for the postman. I suppose he was
awaiting some letter big with the fate of a picture.
He dogged the postman from door to door like
an assassin or a guardian angel; never had he the
courage to ask if there was a letter for him, but al-
most as it fell into the box he had it out and tore
it open, and then if the door closed despairingly
the woman who had been at the window all this
time pressed her hand to her heart. But if the

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