With this resolve fixed, he took refuge in the commonplace.
"Am I late?" he asked.
"Five minutes," she answered. "I didn't know but what you were going to April-fool me."
"Oh, Miss Edna," he cried, "you know I wouldn't do that!"
"I didn't think you would really," she laughed back. "And I felt sure I could get even with you if you did."
Thus lightly chatting, they came to the corner of Broad Street.
"Shall we go down to the Battery?" he suggested, thinking that he might find a chance there to say what was in his heart.
"Yes," she assented; "it'll be first-rate to get a whiff of the salt breeze. It's as warm as spring to-day, isn't it?"
In front of the Stock Exchange, and for two or three blocks below, Broad Street was absolutely bare, except for a little knot of men working over a man-hole of the electrical conduit. The ten-story buildings lifted themselves aloft on both sides of the street, without any evidence of life from window or doorway; they were as silent and seemingly empty as though they belonged to a deserted city of the plains. Bar-rooms in cellars had bock-beer placards before their closed portals. On the glass panel of the swing-door which admitted the week-day passer-by to the Business Men's Quick Lunch there was wafered the bill of fare of the day before, but the door itself was closed tight. So were the entrances to more pretentious restaurants.
But as Filson Shelby and Edna Leisler went on farther down-town, Broad Street slowly changed its character. There were not so many office buildings and more retail shops; there were a few wholesale warehouses; there were even cheap flat-houses; and there were more signs of life. Children began to fill the roadway and the sidewalks. There were boys on tri-cycles, and there were Little Mothers pushing perambulators in which babies lay asleep. There were girls on roller-skates; and one of these, a tall, lanky child, had a frolicsome black poodle, which pulled her quickly along the sidewalk.