Somewhere else. Not at home."
"Why not at home, in the evening?" "No. That won't do," she
overruled me, softly. "Somebody might come in and interrupt me.
I'll wait for you in the little park on Second Avenue and Fifteenth
Street. You know the place, don't you?"
She meant Stuyvesant Park, which the sunny Second Avenue cuts in two, and she explained that our meeting was to take place on the west side of the thoroughfare
"Will you come?" she asked, nervously
"I will, I will. But what's up? Why do you look so serious? Dora!
Dora mine!"
"'S-sh! You had better go. When we meet I'll explain everything. At 4 o'clock, then. Don't forget. As you come up the avenue, going up-town, it is on the left-hand side. Write it down."
To insure against any mistakes on my part she made me repeat it and then jot it down. As she turned to go upstairs she said, in a melancholy whisper: "Good-by, dearest."
When I reached the appointed place the brass hands of the clock on the steeple high overhead indicated ten minutes of 4. It was June, but the day was a typical November day, mildly warm, clear, and charged with the exhilarating breath of a New York autumn. Dora had not yet arrived. The benches in the little park were for the most part occupied by housewives or servant-girls who sat gossiping in front of baby-carriages, amid the noise of romping children. Here and there an elderly man sat smoking his pipe broodingly. They were mostly Germans or Czechs. There were scarcely any of our people in the neighborhood at the period in question, and that was why Dora had selected the place
I stood outside the iron gate, gazing down the avenue. The minutes were insupportably long.
At last her womanly figure came into dim view. My heart leaped. I was in a flutter of mixed anxiety and joyous anticipation. "Oh, she'll back down," I persuaded myself.