of 212½ West 22nd Street.”
The courtroom was silent. The reporter drew nearer—he hoped the sentence would be light—just a few days on the Island in lieu of a fine.
The judge leaned back in his chair and hid his thumbs somewhere under his black robe.
“Assault justified,” he said. “Case dismissed.”
The little man Charles Stuart came blinking out into the sunshine, pausing for a moment at the door of the court and looking furtively behind him as if he half-expected that it was a judicial error. Then, sniffing once or twice, not because he had a cold but for those dim psychological reasons that make people sniff, he moved slowly south with an eye out for a subway station.
He stopped at a news-stand to buy a morning paper; then entering the subway was borne south to 18th Street where he disembarked and walked east to Third Avenue. Here he was employed in an all-night restaurant built of glass and plaster white tile. Here he sat at a desk from curfew until dawn, taking in money and balancing the books of T. Cushmael, the proprietor. And here, through the interminable nights, his eyes, by turning a little to right or left, could rest upon the starched linen uniform of Miss Edna Schaeffer.
Miss Edna Schaeffer was twenty-three, with a sweet mild face and hair that was a living example of how henna should not be applied. She was unaware of this latter fact, because all the girls she knew used henna just this way, so perhaps the odd vermilion tint of her coiffure did not matter.
Charles Stuart had forgotten about the color of her hair long ago—if he had ever noticed its strangeness at all. He was much more interested in her eyes, and in her white hands which, as they moved deftly among piles of plates and cups, always looked as if they should be playing the piano. He had almost asked her to go to a matinee with him once, but when she had faced him her lips half-parted in a weary, cheerful smile, she had seemed so beautiful that he had lost courage and mumbled something else instead.
It was not to see Edna Schaeffer, however, that he had come to the restaurant so early in the afternoon. It was to consult with T. Cushmael, his employer, and discover if he had lost his job during his night in jail. T. Cushmael was standing in the front of the restaurant looking gloomily out the plate-glass window, and Charles Stuart approached him with ominous forebodings.
“Where’ve you been?” demanded T. Cushmael.
“Nowhere,” answered Charles Stuart discreetly.
“Well, you’re fired.”
Stuart winced.
“Right now?”
Cushmael waved his hands apathetically.
“Stay two or three days if you want to, till I find somebody. Then”—he made a gesture of expulsion—“outside for you.”
Charles Stuart assented with a weary little nod. He assented to everything. At nine o’clock, after a depressed interval during which he brooded upon the penalty of spending a night among the police, he reported for work.
“Hello, Mr. Stuart,” said Edna Schaeffer, sauntering curiously toward him as he took his place behind the desk. “What become of you last night? Get pinched?”
She laughed, cheerfully, huskily, charmingly he thought, at her joke.
“Yes,” he answered on a sudden impulse, “I was in the 35th Street jail.”
“Yes, you were,” she scoffed.
“That’s the truth,” he insisted. “I was arrested.”
Her face grew serious at once.
“Go on . What did you do?”
He hesitated.
“I pushed somebody in the face.”
Suddenly she began to laugh, at first with amusement and then immoderately.
“It’s a fact,” mumbled Stuart. “I almost got sent to prison account of it.”
Setting her hand firmly over her mouth Edna turned away from him and retired to the refuge of the kitchen. A little later, when he was pretending to be busy at the accounts, he saw her retailing the story to the two other girls.
The night wore on. The little man in the greyish suit with the greyish face attracted no more attention from the customers than the whirring electric fan over his head. They gave him their money and his hand slid their change into a little hollow in the marble counter. But to Charles Stuart the hours of this night, this last night, began to assume a quality of romance. The slow routine of a hundred other nights unrolled with a new enchantment before his eyes. Midnight was always a sort of a dividing point—after that the intimate part of the evening began. Fewer people came in, and the ones that did seemed depressed and tired: a casual ragged man for coffee, the beggar from the street corner who ate a heavy meal of cakes and a beefsteak, a few nightbound street-women and a watchman with a red face who exchanged warning phrases with him about his health.
Midnight seemed to come early tonight and business was brisk until after one. When Edna began to fold napkins at a nearby table he was tempted to ask her if she too had not found the night unusually short. Vainly he wished that he might impress himself on her in some way, make some remark to her, some sign of his devotion that she would remember forever.
She finished folding the vast pile of napkins, loaded it onto the stand and bore it away, humming to herself. A few minutes later the door opened and two customers came in. He recognized them immediately, and as he did so a flush of jealousy went over him. One of them, a young man in a handsome brown suit, cut away rakishly from his abdomen, had been a frequent visitor for the last ten days. He came in always at about this hour, sat down at one of Edna’s tables, and drank two cups of coffee with lingering ease. On his last two visits he had been accompanied by his present companion, a swarthy Greek with sour eyes who ordered in a loud voice and gave vent to noisy sarcasm when anything was not to his taste.
It was chiefly the young man, though, who annoyed Charles Stuart. The young man’s eyes followed Edna wherever she went, and on his last two visits he had made unnecessary requests in order to bring her more often to his table.
“Good-evening, girlie,” Stuart heard him say tonight. “How’s tricks?”
“O.K.,” answered Edna formally. “What’ll it be?”
“What have you?” smiled the young man. “Everything, eh? Well, what’d you recommend?”
Edna did not answer. Her eyes were staring straight over his head into some invisible distance.
He ordered finally at the urging of his companion. Edna withdrew and Stuart saw the young man turn and whisper to his friend, indicating Edna with his head.
Stuart shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He hated that young man and wished passionately that he would go away. It seemed as if his last night here, his last chance to watch Edna, and perhaps even in some blessed moment to talk to her a little, was marred by every moment this man stayed.
Half a dozen more people had drifted into the restaurant—two or three workmen, the newsdealer from over the way—and Edna was too busy for a few minutes to be bothered with attentions. Suddenly Charles Stuart became aware that the sour-eyed Greek had raised
