“So?” said Hoyt, meditatively. “Well, she's kept her word, hasn't she?”
The two stood looking at the photographs for a time. Then Hoyt pointed to the open blaze in the grate.
“Throw them in,” he commanded. “Don't let your father see them—don't keep them yourself. They wouldn't be agreeable things to keep.”
“That's true enough,” admitted the lady. And she threw them in the fire. Then Virgil Hoyt brought out the plates and broke them before her eyes.
And that was the end of it—except that Hoyt sometimes tells the story to those who sit beside him when his pipe is lighted.
A CHILD OF THE RAIN
IT was the night that Mona Meeks, the dressmaker, told him she didn't love him. He couldn't believe it at first, because he had so long been accustomed to the idea that she did, and no matter how rough the weather or how irascible the passengers, he felt a song in his heart as he punched transfers, and rang his bell punch, and signalled the driver when to let people off and on.
Now, suddenly, with no reason except a woman's, she had changed her mind. He dropped in to see her at five o'clock, just before time for the night shift, and to give her two red apples he had been saving for her. She looked at the apples as if they were invisible and she could not see them, and standing in her disorderly little dressmaking parlor, with its cuttings and scraps and litter of fabrics, she said:
“It is no use, John. I shall have to work here like this all my life—work here alone. For I don't love you, John. No, I don't. I thought I did, but it is a mistake.”