"I tell her we're out for big business to-night, Joe."

"Sky's the limit. Picked up a pin pointin' toward me and sat with my back to a red-headed woman. Can't lose."

"Well, good-night, Babe. Take care o' yourself."

"Good night, Blutch. You'll play 'em close, honey?"

"You just know I will, Babe."

An hour she sat there, alone on the _chaise-longue_, staring into s.p.a.ce and smiling at what she saw there. Finally she dropped back into the lacy mound of pillows, almost instantly asleep, but still smiling.

At four o'clock, that hour before dawn cracks, even the West Forties, where night is too often cacophonous with the sound of revelry, drop into long narrow aisles of gloom. Thin, high-stooped houses with drawn shades recede into the mouse-colored mist of morning, and, as through quagmire, this mist hovering close to ground, figures skulk--that nameless, shapeless race of many bloods and one complexion, the underground complexion of paste long sour from standing.

At somewhat after that hour Mr. Blutch Connors made exit from one of these houses, noiseless, with scarcely a click after him, and then, without pause, pa.s.sed down the brownstone steps and eastward. A taxicab slid by, its honk as sorrowful as the cry of a plover in a bog. Another--this one drawing up alongside, in quest of fare. He moved on, his breath clouding the early air, and his hands plunged deep in his pockets as if to plumb their depth. There was a great sag to the silhouette of him moving thus through the gloom, the chest in and the shoulders rounding and lessening their front span. Once he paused to remove the brown derby and wipe at his brow. A policeman struck his stick. He moved on.

An all-night drug-store, the modern sort of emporium where the capsule and the herb have become side line to the ivoritus toilet-set and the pocket-dictionary, threw a white veil of light across the sidewalk. Well past that window, but as if its image had only just caught up with him, Mr. Connors turned back, retracing ten steps. A display-window, denuded of frippery but strewn with straw and crisscrossed with two large strips of poster, proclaimed Chicklet Face Powder to the cosmetically concerned. With an eye to fidelity, a small brood of small chickens, half dead with bad air and not larger than fists, huddled rearward and out of the grilling light--puny victims to an indorsed method of correspondence-school advertising.

Mr. Connors entered, scouting out a dozy clerk.

"Say, bo, what's one of them chicks worth?"

"Ain't fer sale."

Mr. Connors lowered his voice, nudging.

"I gotta sick wife, bo. Couldn't you slip me one in a 'mergency?"

"What's the idea--chicken broth? You better go in the park and catch her a chippie."

"On the level, friend, one of them little yellow things would cheer her up.

She's great one for pets."

"Can't you see they're half-dead now? What you wanna cheer her up with--a corpse? If I had my way, I'd wring the whole display's neck, anyhow."

"What'll you take for one, bo?"

"It'll freeze to death."

"Look! This side pocket is lined with velvet."

"Dollar."

"Aw, I said one, friend, not the whole brood."

"Leave or take."

Mr. Connors dug deep.

"Make it sixty cents and a poker-chip, bo. It's every cent I got in my pocket."

"Keep the poker-chip for pin-money."

When Mr. Connors emerged, a small, chirruping bunch of fuzz, cupped in his hand, lay snug in the velvet-lined pocket.

At Sixth Avenue, where the great skeleton of the Elevated stalks mid-street, like a prehistoric _pithecanthropus erectus_, he paused for an instant in the shadow of a gigantic black pillar, readjusting the fragile burden to his pocket.

Stepping out to cross the street, simultaneously a great silent motor-car, noiseless but wild with speed, tore down the surface-car tracks, blacker in the hulking shadow of the Elevated trellis.

A quick doubling up of the sagging silhouette, and the groan of a clutch violently thrown. A woman's shriek flying thin and high like a javelin of horror. A crowd sprung full grown out of the bog of the morning. White, peering faces showing up in the brilliant paths of the acetylene lamps. A uniform pushing through. A crowbar and the hard breathing of men straining to lift. A sob in the dark. Stand back! Stand back!

Dawn--then a blue, wintry sky, the color and hardness of enamel; and sunshine, bright, yet so far off the eye could stare up to it unsquinting.

It lay against the pink-brocaded window-hangings of the suite in the Hotel Metropolis; it even crept in like a timid hand reaching toward, yet not quite touching, the full-flung figure of Mrs. Blutch Connors, lying, her cheek dug into the harshness of the carpet, there at the closed door to the bedroom--p.r.o.ne as if washed there, and her yellow hair streaming back like seaweed. Sobs came, but only the dry kind that beat in the throat and then come shrilly, like a sheet of silk swiftly torn.

How frail are human ties, have said the _beaux esprits_ of every age in one epigrammatic fashion or another. But frailty can bleed; in fact, it's first to bleed.

Lying there, with her face swollen and stamped with the carpet-nap, squirming in a grief that was actually abashing before it was heartbreaking, Ann 'Lisbeth Connors, whose only epiphany of life was love, and shut out from so much else that helps make life sweet, was now shut out from none of its pain.

Once she scratched at the door, a faint, dog-like scratch for admission, and then sat back on her heels, staring at the uncompromising panel, holding back the audibility of her sobs with her hand.

Heart-constricting silence, and only the breath of ether seeping out to her, sweet, insidious. She took to hugging herself violently against a sudden chill that rushed over her, rattling her frame.

The bedroom door swung noiselessly back, fanning out the etheric fumes, and closed again upon an emerging figure.

"Doctor--quick--G.o.d!--What?"

He looked down upon her with the kind of glaze over his eyes that Bellini loved to paint, compa.s.sion for the pain of the world almost distilled to tears.

"Doctor--he ain't--"

"My poor little lady!"

"O G.o.d--no--no--no! No, Doctor, no! You wouldn't! Please! Please! You wouldn't let him leave me here all alone, Doctor! O G.o.d! you wouldn't! I'm all alone, Doctor! You see, I'm all alone. Please don't take him from me.

He's mine! You can't! Promise me, Doctor! My darlin' in there--why are you hurtin' him so? Why has he stopped hollerin'? Cut me to pieces to give him what he needs to make him live. Don't take him from me, Doctor. He's all I got! O G.o.d--G.o.d--please!" And fell back swooning, with an old man's tear splashing down as if to revivify her.

The heart has a resiliency. Strained to breaking, it can contract again.

Even the waiting women, Iseult and Penelope, learned, as they sat sorrowing and watching, to sing to the swing of the sea.

When, out of the slough of dark weeks, Mrs. Connors took up life again, she was only beaten, not broken--a reed lashed down by storm and then resilient, daring to lift its head again. A wan little head, but the eyes unwashed of their blue and the irises grown large. The same hard sunshine lay in its path between the brocade curtains of a room strangely denuded.

It was as if spring had died there, when it was only the _chaise-longue_, barren of its lacy pillows, a gla.s.s vase and silver-framed picture gone from the mantel, a Mexican afghan removed from a divan and showing its bulges.

It was any hotel suite now--uncompromising; leave me or take me.

In taking leave of it, Mrs. Connors looked about her even coldly, as if this barren room were too denuded of its memories.