burst in on them and flooded the cold hall as the old man stood in the doorway looking after the retreating cab, and down at the silver shilling.

Darker, dingier, stuffier, seemed the box of a room, as she walked into it and laid her still sleeping babe on the bed. She felt herself moving in an unreal world. David — her David — she had not come to him after all; she had come to an empty place. She knelt and threw her arms about her little son, encircling his head and his feet. She neither wept nor prayed; and the red spot burned against the creamy whiteness of her skin. She was not thinking, only looking, seeing into the past and down the long vista of her future.

Pictures came to her — pictures of her girlhood — her dim aspirations — her melancholy-eyed father —