"Why not to-night."
"No. To-morrow."
They hurriedly talked over the details of her escape. She would tell her aunt the "rush-work story." When the shop closed, Harry could take her somewhere to supper and afterwards to a dance.
"To-morrow night? Sure?" he said when they separated at her corner.
"Sure," she called back.
She ran upstairs and told her aunt that there was a rush order in her shop and she must hurry back; she only had time for a glass of tea and a piece of bread. To-morrow she would take a bigger lunch and not come home for supper. In a few minutes she out was again on the brightly lit streets. From her scant store of savings she bought a hat, a blouse, a pair of stockings and white shoes. She left her bundles at a store near her home, and then started on a pilgrimage.
The shrine she set out to visit was the little second-hand book-store on East Broadway, where she had been so happy with her father. It had hardly changed at all. Only the man who sat on the high stool behind the desk did not look like her father. She stood there aimlessly for a few minutes, and then her eye fell on the first two volumes of Les Miserables. It was the set she had read to her father. The last volume was in her room.
"One volume is gone," the man told her; "you can have them for seventy-five cents."
"I ain't got more'n half a dollar," she said.
"The complete set is worth five dollars."