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must smile; she must be one woman to all men. She must receive the blows
with laughter, the ribaldry, the insults and the curses as wit. She must pass
from this to that—and she must not care.

And yet Mary, who was Violet now, could do nothing but take as final
the conclusion that Rose had drawn for her. To return home, even if she had
the money, would be impossible, because to do so would be to court her
father's anger and her mother's shame, with no hope of either pardon or
justification. To go out into the cheerless street that sent its growling echoes
up to her curtained window would be, she was assured, to deliver herself to
arrest or starvation. She was ignorant and young. With no knowledge of the
laws and the charities of the monster town, she saw only that the former, in
uniform, was a back-door friend of her keepers, and she was told that the
latter never helped before they first publicly burned upon their victims'
brows the thenceforth ineradicable brand of infamy. Without there was, at
the least, hunger, drudgery and disgrace; at the most, starvation, jail, death.
Within, where fresh wounds meant but little, there obtained, under only a
velvet-pawed tyranny, a tolerable democracy of disrepute, an equality of
degradation, where food, at any rate, and shelter and raiment were certain,
and where old scars and fresh bruises were hidden from the world: the price
was no more than supine acquiescence.

Anything like financial independence was, of course, impossible: the

slaves of Rose Légère were as much slaves as any mutilated black man of
the Congo, or any toil-cramped white man in a factory. Their wages were
paid to the supervisor, their few belongings secretly searched for gratuities,
and though one-half of each payment was, theoretically, the portion of the
employé, rent and board and lingerie demanded, and must needs secure,
prices that left each woman hopelessly in debt to the mistress of the house.

With her senses in revolt, the mind and body of the newly-christened
Violet came, by insidious degrees, nevertheless to approach some likeness
to adaptability. Her material wants never went unsupplied, and such
intelligence as she possessed began to swing toward that point of view to
differ from which could bring nothing save serious discomfort. To the hope
of Max's return she still, in her own heart, clung with that tenacity which
only a woman can exert upon an acknowledged impossibility, but she felt
even this hope shrink between her clutching fingers, and, doing her best to
reason, she knew that, even should the miracle happen, Max had brought
her and left her here with the intent that she should fulfill her economic
destiny.

Too dull to see deeply into causes, she could only accept the slowly
numbing hail of effects. Until a few days since, she had been a child, and,
like most children, the individual at fault in every personal catastrophe. It
was thus that she began by blaming herself for all that had now befallen
her; it was only at moments of growth that she turned her anger first against
her own parents, then against the active agent and finally against his
principal, and it would be but after deeper vision and harder usage that she
could see both herself and them, and the whole company that made them
possible, as mere grist in the mill of a merciless machine.

And yet for a long time her one passion was the passion of release.
Without clothes and money and protection she could understand no escape;
but for these means she at last found courage to appeal to the one source
from which she could conceive of their coming.

VI

AN ANGEL UNAWARES

The man to whom she first spoke, in a stolen instant, descending the
darkened stair, was a small shopkeeper, fat and pliable, beyond the age of
violence, and, as he had just told her, a husband and the father of a girl of
her own age.

"Listen," she said, with one trembling hand upon his shoulder, "I want
you to do me a favor."
 "Anything you say, Violet," he chuckled.

"Don't talk so loud, then. I—I want you to take me out of here."

The man looked at her, through the rosy twilight, in a flattered

bewilderment.

"Like me as much as that, do you?" he sparred.

"You don't understand. Of course, I like you; but what I meant was
——"

He interrupted her, his fat fingers complacently patting her cheek.

"It's not me that don't tumble to the facts," he said; "it's you. I told you I
was a family man. I couldn't put you anywhere."

"I don't mean that. I mean——"

But again he cut in upon her labored explanation, his commercial mind
traveling along lines in which it had been forced all his life to travel, and his
pride entrenching itself behind the trivial rampart of his income.

"You girls!" he laughed, in palpable deception. "You all think I've got a
lot of money. Why, there ain't no use thinkin' you can bleed me. I'm a
business man, an' I do everything on a straight business basis, but I wouldn't
rent a flat for the finest of you that ever walked Fourteenth Street."

Violet's answer was brief. That she should have given her confidence to
such a beast, that such a beast should continue to thrive in the world that
was closed to her, and that, her pitiable confidence once given, she should
be so grossly misinterpreted—these things sent a red rage rushing to her
now always incarnadined cheeks. She gave the shopkeeper a push that
nearly sent him rolling to the foot of the stairs.

"Get away from me!" she whispered hoarsely. "Get away! I wouldn't
have you for a gift!"
 The man stumbled and gripped the rose-colored lamp upon the newel-
post, which swayed, under his rocking weight, like a palm-tree in a storm.
He gasped for breath, got it, and, shaking his fist upward through the
shadows, began to bellow forth a storm of oaths that, for foulness, utterly
outdid the ejaculations to which, from both sexes, Violet was already
becoming accustomed.

"You come down here," he courageously shouted, "and I'll give you the
worst beating you ever had in your life! Nice place, this is! I'll have it
pinched—you see if I don't! You can't make an easy thing out o' me! You've
robbed me, anyhow. You'll get what's comin' to you!"—And he ended with
the single epithet to which those four walls were unaccustomed.

Rose ran out from the parlor.

"Shut up, you!" she commanded of the disturber, in a low tone that
nevertheless compelled obedience. "What's the trouble, Violet?"

Violet leaned against the stair-wall, half-way up, her burning hands
pressed to her burning face. She was mad with anger and shame, but she
was also afraid.

"You heard him," she gasped.

"Yes," snapped the visitor, his voice uncontrollably resuming its former
timbre, "and you heard me, too!"

The mistress is, of necessity, always, in a crisis, against the slave.

"Well," said Rose, "tell me what she done."

Violet, however, saw at once the necessity of changing the issue.

"He says he's been robbed!" she called down the stairs. And then she
ran after her words, and stood under the lamp, facing them both, her arms
extended, the flowing sleeves trembling with the emotion that they covered
but could not conceal. "Search me!" she commanded. "If you think I took a
cent of yours, search me!"
 She was a vision that brought conviction with it.

Before the sputtering visitor could correct the situation, Rose had,
perhaps against her will, been converted. She took the man's hat from the
hall-rack at her side, put it on his head, opened the street-door, and gently
propelled him through it.

"You're drunk," she said, "an' you'd better get out before I call the cop.
There ain't no badger business in this house, an' don't you forget it!"

She shut the door, and turned calmly to Violet.

"How much did you get?" she asked.

"Why, Miss Rose, you know——"

"I mean what did you touch him for? You mustn't play that sort of game
here: it gives the house a bad name. But just this once we'll divide up an'
not say anything more about it."

Violet's eyes opened wide.

"I didn't steal a penny," she declared.

Rose regarded her with a softening countenance.

"Word of honor?" she asked.

"Word of honor," vowed Violet.

"All right, but even if you do touch them, you mustn't ever let them
think you do. A man'll forgive you for hurtin' him anywhere but in his
pocket-book.—You're all worked up, dearie. Come on out to the kitchen an'
have a bottle of beer."

As they were pouring the drinks, a heavy foot sounded in the outside
passageway and a careful four knocks followed upon the rear door.

"That's Larry," said Rose, and drew the bolt.

 A policeman's hat was poked through the doorway, followed by a
flushed, genial Irish face, and a tall, hulking body in regulation uniform.

"I'm terrible dry," grinned Larry.

"Then you've come to the right shop," was Rose's greeting. "We're just
havin' a little drop ourselves. Larry, this is my new friend, Violet."

The policeman grinned again, and sat carefully upon the edge of a
kitchen-chair, in evident fear that his bulk might prove too great for it.

"Glad to know you," he said.

"Larry's on this beat nights," Rose explained to Violet, "an' him an' the
lieutenant look after us—don't you, Riley?"

"Well, what use is a frind if he don't take care of yez, Miss Rose? We do
the bist we can."

"I know that.—What'll it be, Larry? We're takin' beer, but there's wine
on the ice if you want it."

"I'll just have a small drap of liquor, ma'am, please," said Riley.

Rose poured and handed to him a glass of whiskey.

"When you came by," she inquired, "did you see a fat man throwin' fits
in our gutter?"

"Why, I did not. Have ye been afther havin' a rumpus the night?"

"Oh, no—only that fat little fellow that keeps the jewelry-store around
the corner. He was drunk, an' I threw him out. If he tries to get gay, let me
know, will you?"

"Of course I'll let ye know—an' here's to your very good health, ma'am
an' miss.—But you may rist aisy; that there won't be no throuble."

"I know that: he's too scared of his wife.—Have another, won't you?"
 The officer rose.

"No, thank ye kindly," he said. "I wanted but the drap, ma'am."

"And how are Mrs. Riley and the children?"

Larry's face became a web of smiling wrinkles.

"Grand," he said; "the auld woman's grand—you ought to see her in the
new silk dress I bought 'er the day—all grane wid fancy trimmin's from Six'
Avenoo. An' the kiddies is thrivin'. Cecilia'll soon be havin' to go to work
an' help the family funds, she's that sthrong and hearty, an' young Van Wyck
is such a divil that the teacher throwed him out of school. He's licked all the
b'ys in his class, an' I think he'll end as a champeen pug."

He went out, still smiling, and, as he did so, Violet saw Rose, after
stooping hurriedly, place in his hands a yellow bill. As the door closed,
there came into the younger woman's eyes the question that she would not
have dared to ask.

"Yep," nodded Rose, "that's my week's pay for what they call
protection."

"Isn't he afraid to take it?" Violet, thus encouraged, inquired.

"The man above him isn't afraid to take two-thirds of it," said Rose, "an'
the best of it goes past him to the district boss—it's the regular system with
the regular prices. Oh, no, he ain't afraid; an' if you ever tried to live on a
copper's pay, you'd soon be afraid not to take it."

Violet, returning to the parlor, bit her lip: there was indeed small help to
be had from the law.

Small help, either there or elsewhere. She turned, naturally, only to the
seemingly more prosperous customers, but, even by them, she was met with
smiling incredulity: her story was so hackneyed that it could not be true.

"It's all right enough to want to get out of here," said her sagest adviser,
who at least paid her the rare compliment of credence; "but how are you
going to live after you get out? You can't go home; you haven't got any
trade; you can't cook; without a recommendation you can't get even a job at
general housework or in a factory."

He was a quiet, middle-aged widower that said this, an infrequent

visitor, a chief clerk in one of the departments of a large insurance
company, with a reputation for liberal kindliness at Rose's and, in his own
little world, a position of some influence.

"You get me out," said Violet, "an' I'll do the rest."

But here again the gate was barred against her. The clerk was burdened
with a good name and a place of trust. He could risk neither the one nor the
other. He was sorry, genuinely sorry—she saw that; but what could he do?

It was an evening or two later that she found her first pale ray of
encouragement, and she found it in the person of Philip Beekman, that same
young Beekman to whom Fritzie had casually referred.

Beekman described himself, with some accuracy, as a person of good

family and bad morals. "We are getting so confounded poor," he used to
say, "that I sometimes doubt the former; but I have constant visible
evidence of the latter, and so I cling to that as the one sure thing in this
uncertain life." Had he but seen the facts, he might well have considered his
derelictions as the result of his parentage. At her divorce, his mother had
been awarded the custody of her only child, and, now that she had
remarried, Philip was forced to play that neither uncommon nor congenial
rôle—the part of the young man with too little training to earn a living and
too much ancestry to marry one.

"After all," he said, as he sat with Violet in the many-colored back

parlor, a half-empty bottle between them, his usually pale face aglow, his
gray eyes filmy, and his black hair tumbled by the constant passage through
it of his long, nervous fingers—"after all, you see, you and I are in the same
boat. You can't get out because, if you do, the sharks will eat you, and I
daren't get out because I can't swim."
 Always haunted by the fear that, in some manner, her true story might
reach her own town and her own people, Violet had told him only as much
as she dared, and what she had said had moved his impulsive generosity.

"But anyway," he insisted, "you can do one thing that I can't."

She clutched at the straw.

"What's that?" she asked.

"You can get help from shore."

"How do you mean?"

"I mean that if you'll write a letter home, I'll mail it."

She shook her head: the straw crumpled in her fingers.

"There's no use of that," she said.

"Of course there is. After all, your father's your father, you see, and I
don't know a father that wouldn't help his daughter out of the sort of mess
you've got into."

"I know one," said Violet, grimly.

"Not till you try him, you don't."

"Yes, I do. If you was in my place would your father——"

"Which father?" laughed Beekman. "My one won't have anything to do

with me because I live with the other, and the other won't have anything to
do with me because I'm the son of his predecessor.—You take my advice
and write home."

"I'd never get an answer."

She spoke in an even tone, but there was no mistaking the tragedy that
underlay it.
 Beekman looked at her and blinked queerly. He brought his fist down
smartly among the jangling glasses.

"It's a rotten shame!" he said. "A dirty, rotten shame! Why, don't you
know that that yid who got you into this makes a business of such things?
Don't you know there's a whole army of them that do? I wish to the Lord I
could do something, but there isn't a policeman or a magistrate in the city
who'd listen to me—they know too well where they get the jam for their
bread and butter—and I can't get a job for even myself, let alone you!"

She had not, however, heard his last sentence. Her blue eyes wide, she
was hanging on his reference to Max.

"A business?" she repeated. "Do you mean that men make money—that
way?"

"Of course I do." The film passed suddenly from Beekman's eyes,
leaving them alert with purpose. "Look here," he said, "there is one thing I
can do, and I don't know anything that I'd enjoy more: you give me that
little kyke's name, and I'll push his face out of the back of his head!"

Then there happened a strange thing. She had long guessed and now she
knew, but guessing or knowing, she would not believe. As much for her
own sanity as for Max's safety, she lied.

"The name he gave me," she said, "wasn't his right one. It wasn't even
one he mostly used. And I never knew no other."

Beekman raised his hands in more than mock despair, and got up to go.

"Well," he declared, "I don't know what I can do for you. If I got into
any scandal, it would punch the last hole in my meal-ticket."

Violet, who was becoming accustomed to such replies, smiled kindly.

"I don't want you to get into no trouble for me," she said.

"I know you don't, and I couldn't be any use if I did. But I'll promise
you this: I'll keep my eyes open, and if anything does turn up, I'll be
Johnny-on-the-spot, all right."

"Thank you," said Violet.

"And look here," pursued Beekman, "I know that it's all rot to expect
you to walk out of here without friends or a job; I know that, unless you've
got one or the other, you're just simply in jail here; but if I can't get you
anything, there must be those who can. Why don't you talk to the coal-men,
or the gas-inspectors, or—I tell you, I've seen that tow-headed Dutchman
who leaves the beer here. He looks straight, and he stops at the door. Why
don't you talk to him? He's the sort that would know of a job for—for——"

Beekman hesitated, blushing like a schoolboy.

"For my sort?" asked Violet. "Maybe he is. Thank you. Anyhow I'll
see."

And she did see. When Beekman left her, pressing into her hand the last
piece of money that he would have for a week, he gave her at the same time
so much of hope. Those who seemed rich could not help her; she would
appeal to those who were poor.

She was up early and in the kitchen the next morning at the hour when
she knew the brewery-wagon would stop outside, and she sent the ebon
Cassie on an errand to the corner pharmacy. The maid had scarcely closed
the door before Violet was summoned to open it to the German of whom
Beekman had spoken.

Philip had observed well. The brewery's driver, who stood whistling in
the areaway, was a short, stocky man with the neck and arms of a gladiator
and the round, smiling face of a child. His blue overalls and dark cloth cap
accentuated the fairness of his hair, and his round inquiring eyes were alive
with continual good-humor. He had just piled a half-dozen cases of beer
beside the doorway.

Violet, in her crimson kimona, took from the table the money that had
been left for him.
 "Good-morning," she said as she handed him the bills.

He accepted the money with his left hand and, with his right, raised his
cap from his clustering curls. His lips ceased whistling, half regretfully.

"Goot-mornin'," he replied, smiling.

"Won't you come in and have a drink?" asked Violet, adopting Rose's
form of salutation.

"No, t'ank you," the German shook his head. "I neffer trinks nussing bud
beer."

"Well," said Violet, "we have lots of that now."

"Und I neffer trink dot till tinner."

There was an awkward pause. The German, not knowing how to leave
without seeming rudeness, was shifting his weight from one heavily shod
foot to the other. The woman, uncertain how to say the words she wanted to
say, remained with her hand upon the knob.

"You don't?" she awkwardly repeated.

"No, und so I t'ink—I t'ink I besser be goin'," he hurriedly concluded,

and began to turn on his heel.

The necessity for quick action roused her.

"Wait," she said. And then, as he faced her again in mute wonder, she
pressed another bill into his hand. "I want you to help me," she continued.
"I want to get a job somewhere, and I don't want Miss Rose to know
nothing about it."

He looked from the bill to her, still wondering.

"So-o?" he responded.
 "Yes, I want work—some other kind of work—and I thought perhaps
you might"—her voice faltered—"might know of some kind."

The German's mobile face underwent a quick change. First

astonishment and then something not far removed from tears came into his
childlike eyes. He crushed the bill in his big red fist.

"So-o?" he repeated.

"Yes, I—you understand that I must have friends or a job if I am to get

away from here, and I thought you might know of something."

The German bobbed his curls.

"I know dot right vell," he said; "bud I don' know no tshob chust now."

Violet's face darkened.

"All right," she answered, "I only hoped maybe——"

"Look here, miss," the driver cut in with a note of ready feeling in his
voice. "You mean all dot?"

"All what?"

"About geddin' ozzer—aboud a real tshob."

"If I had the clothes and a place I'd go this minute."

"Vell, den, listen. I've chust god a new blace; I'm goin' to be bar-tender
ofer on Segond Avenue, bud I gan send back here if I hear anysing.—Your
name?"

"Violet—just Miss Violet."

"All righd, Miss Violet, I know some more aboud dese blaces like dis
dan you maybe t'ink, und I guess maybe I gan do somesing. Nex' Sunday I
dake my girl to Coney, und den ve'll dalk sings ofer und ve'll see vhat Katie
says."
 In spite of the promised delay and the growing habit of doubt, Violet's
face kindled.

"You're good," she said simply, "and I'll trust you."

"Oh, I make nussing," replied the German, smiling once more, "bud
chust you vait: Katie gan fix it; she gan fix anysing."

Before Violet could reply, he had resumed his whistling and run down
the alleyway; and she saw that he had tossed back her money on the
topmost beercase.

VII

HOLIDAY

That Sunday morning in his single, dark, narrow room, Hermann

Hoffmann, the erstwhile driver of a brewery-wagon and the coming Second
Avenue barkeeper, arose with the dawn, just as if it had been a workday
morning, and set about his elaborate toilet, whistling.

To the casual eye there would have seemed little in his surroundings to
inspire any lyric joy. The cell-like apartment, which was the only spot on
earth that Hermann might call his home, was a back room on the top floor
of a damp and gloomy tenement in a filthy court running off Houston Street
near Avenue A. Only at noon did the pale sunlight strain into that court,
crowded all morning with malarious dogs and dirty, toddling babies
solemnly, but vainly, trying to learn how to play, and echoing all through
the black night now to the curses of scarred, slinking tiger-cats, now to the
staggering footsteps or the brawling oaths of drunkards reeling homeward
through the evil-smelling darkness, and again to the piercing cry of a
woman in mortal agony or mortal fear.
 Robbins's Row was no place for a policeman after nightfall, and
scarcely a safer place for a stranger by day. From its sagging file of dirty,
paper-patched windows, more or less feminine shapes leaned out, calling
gossip to their neighbors, and hauling at the pullied ropes that, crossing the
street, spread above the pedestrians a tossing, parti-colored canopy of
"wash." You entered it by climbing three rotting wooden steps, by
stumbling through a wet hall, where a blue-burning gas-jet accentuated the
sense of perpetual midnight, and you could reach the room of Hermann
Hoffmann only by a perilous climb of six flights of stairs.

That room was as bare as any in the building. It looked out, by a single
slit in the wall, upon a light-shaft, strangely misnamed. Its only furniture
was a cot, a wooden-seated chair, a washstand, and, bearing comb and
brushes and shaving-utensils, one of those pine bureaus the drawers of
which may be opened in ten minutes, and closed, if you are lucky, in
fifteen. Yet the note of the place was the note of order and of neatness; the
bare floor was clean, and, against the fresh and brightly papered wall, there
hung here a calico curtain that hid the tenant's wardrobe and there a single
shelf bearing only, as if it were an altar consecrated to one holy object, a
thumbed and dog's-eared copy of "Das Kapital."

Hermann plunged his ruddy face, whistling, into a bowl of water and
drew it out, more ruddy and whistling still. Even the author of that
portentous volume on the book-shelf used to sing "Strausbourg," and
Hermann's single anthem was "Die Wacht Am Rhein."

Still pursuing that inspiring music, he turned to the bureau and began to
shave the yellow down from his cheeks and chin. Thrust between the
exaggerating mirror and its frame were two photographs—the one, a trifle
faded, of a matronly, kindly woman of his own race, perhaps fifty years old,
stiffly arrayed in a silk dress rigorously American, and the other, a new one,
that of a young girl in a great hat and unmistakably Manhattan dress, a
young girl with a pretty, piquant face of that distinctively American type—
the Irish. Perhaps these photographs distracted the German's attention;
perhaps it was only that no man living can successfully whistle and shave at
one and the same time. At any rate, his hand shook, and the razor cut a light
gash in his upper lip.
 He flung the offending blade from him, and it struck the mirror,
cracking the glass across one corner.

"Ach, Gott," he smiled, as he staunched the blood with a heavy pressure

through a rough towel; and then, in the English that he used even in his
soliloquies: "Dey say now dot means bad luck fer seven year. Lucky is't dot
I am not suberstitious!"

And then, undisturbed, he quietly resumed his whistling, finished

shaving, sleeked down his rebellious tow-colored curls, got into a newly
pressed brown suit and yellow shirt, donned a high collar and salmon tie,
and, setting a carefully brushed derby upon his head, descended to the
narrow street, the strains of "Die Wacht Am Rhein" lingering behind him
through the darkened hallway.

To accomplish the purpose of his early rising, he took the Third Avenue
elevated to the Forty-second Street station. There he bought two bouquets
of carnations—one pink and the other white—and boarded a suburban train,
which bore him, at last, to one of those little stations that New York, which
has so small time for remembrance, has selected for the hiding of its dead.

In the warm sunlight of the spring morning, Hermann picked his certain
way among the green grass and the white-roofed habitations of the sleepers,
until he came upon a little plot, by no means the cheapest or more obscure
in the burying-ground, and there, his lips still pursed, but silent now, took
off his shining derby and paused before the solitary white stone. With much
that was unaffectedly reverent, he knelt, according to his weekly custom,
and placed the white carnations on the grave, and with a great deal that was
just as unaffectedly proud, he read, also according to that custom, the
inscription cut upon the white stone that he had purchased with what, when
he paid the bill, happened to be his last dollar:

Here In Peace
Lies The Body Of
WlLHELMINA HOFFMANN,
Widow Of Ludwig Hoffmann,
Of Andernach, Rhenish Prussia,
Who Dep't'd This Life, Jan. 10, 1907.
 ———
"Wait thou, wait thou; soon thou shall rest also."

The inscription was in English, but when he had finished reading it, the
dead woman's son said, under his breath, the Lord's Prayer in the language
of Luther, as she had taught it him.

"She liked me to pray," he shamefacedly explained to the

circumambient atmosphere, as if prayer in any tongue were a compromise
with his principles. "Und vhile I'm aboud it, I mighd as vell use de old
langwage. If the Herr Gott listens at all, He'd hear it some besser in de vay
She said it."

And then he resumed his hat and his anthem, and returned to town.

Katie Flanagan was waiting for him as he came hurrying up the steps
from the subway at Park Place—the piquant, pretty girl of the photograph,
in black, because her parents had died not long since, but in black just as
elaborate as her slender purse would permit, because she knew the full
value of her raven hair and blossoming cheeks and tender eyes of Irish blue.

"Ach," gasped Hermann, "hof I kep' you a long time vaitin'?"

"Only about as long as you mostly do," she answered. Her voice was
like her eyes, and she spoke with but the charming hint of a Galway brogue.

The German's cheeks burned with humiliation.

"I'm sorry," he apologized. "I god up early to be on dime, bud de train

vas lade from the cem't'ry in."

She understood and smiled.

"It's only five minutes I've been here," she confessed.

"Und I brought you a few bosies, Katie. I d'ought maybe——"

 "Oh!" she seized the carnations with a laugh of delight, and buried her
nose in them. "It's good y'are to think of such things, Hermann—and a bad
lad that y'are to spend the money so!"

They were making their way toward the Bridge, the sturdy Hoffmann
shouldering a passage through the momentarily swelling Sunday morning
crowd.

"Dot liddle makes nussing," he proudly protested. "To-morrow I begin

ad my new tshob."

"But that," said Katie, "won't pay you hardly wan dollar a week more'n
the brewery did. I dunno, but I think——"

There, however, her protest, for the moment, ended. They were caught,
clinging together, in the whirlpool of the entrance; carried nearly off their
feet, rushed by the ticket-window with a quick exchange of small coin, and,
a few minutes later, were battling their way among the press into a waiting
Coney Island train.

In the last charge, Hermann, his lips puckered in the battle-hymn, did
heroic service. While Katie hung tightly to one arm, he used manfully the
elbow of the other; pushed a guard to the right; shoved two cigarette-
smoking youths to the left; wriggled through the already crowded platform
and shot into one of the coveted "cross-seats." Much of the park would not
be open for a month or more to come, but New York was already clamoring
for its playground.

Katie, flushed and triumphant, sank beside him, and busied herself with
the task of straightening her big black hat. Hermann watched her in frank
admiration as she sat there, her arms raised to her head, in that pose which,
of all others, is the most becoming to her sex.

"What are you lookin' at?" she archly wondered, casting a smiling,
sidelong, blue glance at him.

But before her the strong man was a timid child.

 "Ad de brettiest bicture in a whole vorld," he stammered.

Katie laughed again.

"Och," she said in gratified disapproval, "there sure must be a Castle

Blarney somewhere on the Rhine. What favor are you wantin' to ask me
now, I wonder."

Once he had started, Hermann was too dogged thus to be retarded.

"It's chust de same old fafor," he pleaded, as, with a great creaking of
brakes, the train began to swing upon the Bridge. "Now I god my new
tshob, Katie, there gan't for nod hafin' our veddin' be no good reason, gan
dere?"

"There's one," she said, still delighting in her coquetry; "there's one
reason."

"Vat is 't?"

"Its name is Father Kelly."

"Katie, you von't led dot gount!"

"I will so."

"Und I haf to gome into your church, und—und all dem d'ings?"

"You do that."

Hermann squirmed; but he knew of old that from this point she was
neither to be persuaded nor driven. It was a discussion that they had held
many a time before, and every time she would give him no answer to his
suit until he should surrender in this particular. Now, however, he
considered himself about to set foot upon the highroad to prosperity, and the
prosperous can ill afford to skimp magnanimity.

"All righd," he at last somewhat ruefully conceded, though with certain

mental reservations into which it seemed then unnecessary to enter: "I'm a
strong von, und hof stood a lot a'ready, so I t'ink I gan stand dot too. I'll do
it."

He took her by surprise.

"Promise?" she asked.

"Sure I bromise."

"No backin' out whatever happens?"

"No packin' oud."

"Well, God bless you then."

There was a catch in her voice as she said it. Into her lonely,
hardworking life, this strong, soft-hearted, poor and cheerful German had
brought about all the sunshine that she had latterly known, and she could
think of nothing better than to give him the answer that he was so honestly
anxious to hear. But, though he had become more and more to her from the
first evening when he had seized her as she was falling from the platform of
a surface-car that had started too quickly on its way, she had seen enough of
the warfare with poverty in her own family to resolve that she would not
marry until she could contribute her share to the wages of the resulting
household, and now she had neither a position nor the immediate likelihood
of obtaining one. It was hard, but she was used to hardship, and so, because
she must not cry, she smiled.

Hermann tried to grasp her hand, but she easily eluded him.

"Den, vhen do ve say?" he eagerly demanded.

Much as it hurt her to hurt him, she laughed her answer:

"As soon as I get me fingers on a job that'll pay me six dollars a week,
we'll have Father Kelly say the words for us."

"But Katie"—he used to say "Gatie" until she had teased him out of it
—"you don' mean dot! You said—you dold me—you bromise——"