and had gone by.
“You got out of that lucky.”
Tillie rose and tied a gingham apron over her white one.
“I guess so. Only sometimes—”
“I don't know as it would have been so wrong. He ain't young, and I ain't. And we're not getting any younger. He had nice manners; he'd have been good to me.”
Mrs. McKee's voice failed her. For a moment she gasped like a fish. Then:
“And him a married man!”
“Well, I'm not going to do it,” Tillie soothed her. “I get to thinking about it sometimes; that's all. This new fellow made me think of him. He's got the same nice way about him.”
Aye, the new man had made her think of him, and June, and the lovers who lounged along the Street in the moonlit avenues toward the park and love; even Sidney's pink roses. Change was in the very air of the Street that June morning. It was in Tillie, making a last clutch at youth, and finding, in this pale flare of dying passion, courage to remember what she had schooled herself to forget; in Harriet asserting her right to live her life; in Sidney, planning with eager eyes a life of service which did not include Joe; in K. Le Moyne, who had built up a wall between himself and the world, and was seeing it demolished by a deaf-and-dumb book agent whose weapon was a pencil pad!
And yet, for a week nothing happened: Joe came in the evenings and sat on the steps with Sidney, his honest heart, in his eyes. She could not bring herself at first to tell him about the hospital. She put it off from day to day. Anna, no longer sulky, accepted with the childlike faith Sidney's statement that “they'd get along; she had a splendid scheme,” and took to helping Harriet in her preparations for leaving. Tillie, afraid of her rebellious spirit, went to prayer meeting. And K. Le Moyne, finding his little room hot in the evenings and not wishing to intrude on the two on the doorstep, took to reading his paper in the park, and after twilight to long, rapid walks out into the country. The walks satisfied the craving of his active body for exercise, and tired him so he could sleep. On one such occasion he met Mr. Wagner, and they carried on an animated conversation until it was too dark to see the pad. Even then, it developed that Wagner could write in the dark; and he secured the last word in a long argument by doing this and striking a match for K. to read by.
When K. was sure that the boy had gone, he would turn back toward the Street. Some of the heaviness of his spirit always left him at sight of the little house. Its kindly atmosphere seemed to reach out and envelop him. Within was order and quiet, the fresh-down bed, the tidiness of his ordered garments. There was even affection—Reginald, waiting on the fender for his supper, and regarding him with wary and bright-eyed friendliness.
Life, that had seemed so simple, had grown very complicated for Sidney. There was her mother to break the news to, and Joe. Harriet would approve, she felt; but these others! To assure Anna that she must manage alone for three years, in order to be happy and comfortable afterward—that was hard enough to tell Joe she was planning a future without him, to destroy the light in his blue eyes—that hurt.
After all, Sidney told K. first. One Friday evening, coming home late, as usual, he found her on the doorstep, and Joe gone. She moved over hospitably. The moon had waxed and waned, and the Street was dark. Even the ailanthus blossoms had ceased their snow-like dropping. The colored man who drove Dr. Ed in the old buggy on his daily rounds had brought out the hose and sprinkled the street. Within this zone of freshness, of wet asphalt and dripping gutters, Sidney sat, cool and silent.
“Please sit down. It is cool now. My idea of luxury is to have the Street sprinkled on a hot night.”
K. disposed of his long legs on the steps. He was trying to fit his own ideas of luxury to a garden hose and a city street.
“I'm afraid you're working too hard.”
“I? I do a minimum of labor for a minimum of wage.
“But you work at night, don't you?”
K. was natively honest. He hesitated. Then:
“No, Miss Page.”
“But You go out every evening!” Suddenly the truth burst on her.
“Oh, dear!” she said. “I do believe—why, how silly of you!”
K. was most uncomfortable.
“Really, I like it,” he protested. “I hang over a desk all day, and in the evening I want to walk. I ramble around the park and see lovers on benches—it's rather thrilling. They sit on the same benches evening after evening. I know a lot of them by sight, and if they're not there I wonder if they have quarreled, or if they have finally got married and ended the romance. You can see how exciting it is.”
Quite suddenly Sidney laughed.
“How very nice you are!” she said—“and how absurd! Why should their getting married end the romance? And don't you know that, if you insist on walking the streets and parks at night because Joe Drummond is here, I shall have to tell him not to come?”
This did not follow, to K.'s mind. They had rather a heated argument over it, and became much better acquainted.
“If I were engaged to him,” Sidney ended, her cheeks very pink, “I—I might understand. But, as I am not—”
“Ah!” said K., a trifle unsteadily. “So you are not?”
Only a week—and love was one of the things she had had to give up, with others. Not, of course, that he was in love with Sidney then. But he had been desperately lonely, and, for all her practical clearheadedness, she was softly and appealingly feminine. By way of keeping his head, he talked suddenly and earnestly of Mrs. McKee, and food, and Tillie, and of Mr. Wagner and the pencil pad.
“It's like a game,” he said. “We disagree on everything, especially Mexico. If you ever tried to spell those Mexican names—”
“Why did you think I was engaged?” she insisted.
Now, in K.'s walk of life—that walk of life where there are no toothpicks, and no one would have believed that twenty-one meals could have been secured for five dollars with a ticket punch thrown in—young girls did not receive the attention of one young man to the exclusion of others unless they were engaged. But he could hardly say that.
“Oh, I don't know. Those things get in the air. I am quite certain, for instance, that Reginald suspects it.”
“It's Johnny Rosenfeld,” said Sidney, with decision. “It's horrible, the way things get about. Because Joe sent me a box of roses—As a matter of fact, I'm not engaged, or going to be, Mr. Le Moyne. I'm going into a hospital to be a nurse.”
Le Moyne said nothing. For just a moment he closed his eyes. A man is in a rather a bad way when, every time he closes his eyes, he sees the same thing, especially if it is rather terrible. When it gets to a point where he lies awake at night and reads, for fear of closing them—
“You're too young, aren't you?”
“Dr. Ed—one of the Wilsons across the Street—is going to help me about that. His brother Max is a big surgeon there. I expect you've heard of him. We're very proud of him in the Street.”
Lucky for K. Le Moyne that the moon no longer
