The door at the end of the nearest wing of the house opened and Miss Blake stood on the threshold and held up her hands. At sight of her the dogs stopped their howling instantly and cringed on their bellies or sat yawning on their bushy haunches. Miss Blake's resonant, deep voice seemed to pounce upon Sheila above the chatter of the stream which, running about three sides of the glade, was now, at the silence of the dogs, incessantly audible.

"Well, if it isn't the little barmaid!" cried Miss Blake, and advanced, wiping her hand on a white apron tied absurdly over the corduroy trousers and cowboy boots. "Well, if you aren't as welcome as the flowers in May! So you thought you'd leave the street-lamps and come take a look at the stars?"

They met and Sheila took the strong, square hand. She was afflicted by a sudden dizziness.

"That's it," she faltered; "this time I thought I'd try—the stars."

With that she fell against Miss Blake and felt, just before she dropped into blackness, that she had been saved by firm arms from falling to the ground.

CHAPTER IV

BEASTS

The city rippled into light. It bloomed, blossom on blossom, like some enchanted jungle under the heavy summer sky. Dickie sat on a bench in Washington Square. He sat forward, his hands hanging between his knees, his lips parted, and he watched the night. It seemed to him that it was filled with the clamor of iron-throated beasts running to and fro after their prey. The heat was a humid, solid, breathless weight—a heat unknown to Millings. Dickie wore his threadbare blue serge suit. It felt like a garment of lead.

There were other people on the benches—limp and sodden outlines. Dickie had glanced at them and had glanced away. He did not want to think that he looked like one of these—half-crushed insects,—bruised into immobility. A bus swept round the corner and moved with a sort of topheavy, tipsy dignity under the white arch. It was loaded with humanity, its top black with heads. "It ain't a crowd," thought Dickie; "it's a swarm." His eyes followed the ragged sky-line. "Why is it so horrible?" he asked himself—"horrible and beautiful and sort of poisonous—it plumb scares a fellow—" A diminished moon, battered and dim like a trodden silver coin, stood up above him. By tilting his head he could look directly at it through an opening in the dusty, electric-brightened boughs. The stars were pin-pricks here and there in the dense sky. The city flaunted its easy splendor triumphantly before their pallid insignificance. Tarnished purities, forgotten ecstasies, burned-out inspirations—so the city shouted raucously to its faded firmament.

Dickie's fingers slid into his pocket. The moon had reminded him of his one remaining dime. He might have bought a night's lodging with it, but after one experience of such lodgings he preferred his present quarters. In Dickie's mind there was no association of shame or ignominy with a night spent under the sky. But fear and ignominy tainted and clung to his memory of that other night. He had saved his dime deliberately, going hungry rather than admit to himself that he was absolutely at the end of his resources. To-morrow he would not especially need that dime. He had a job. He would begin to draw pay. In his own phrasing he would "buy him a square meal and rent him a room somewhere." Upon these two prospects his brain fastened with a leech-like persistency. And yet above anything he had faced in his life he dreaded the job and the room. The inspiration of his flight, the impulse that had sped him out of Millings like a fire-tipped arrow, that determination to find Sheila, to rehabilitate himself in her esteem, to serve her, to make a fresh start, had fallen from him like a dead flame. The arrow-flight was spent. He had not found Sheila. He had no way of finding her. She was not at her old address. Her father's friend, the Mr. Hazeldean that had brought Sylvester to Marcus's studio, knew nothing of her. Mrs. Halligan, her former landlady, knew nothing of her. Dickie, having summoned Mrs. Halligan to her doorsill, had looked past her up the narrow, steep staircase. "Did she live away up there?" he had asked. "Yes, sorr. And 't was a climb for the poor little crayture, but there was days when she'd come down it like a burrd to meet her Pa." Dickie had faltered, white and empty-hearted, before the kindly Irishwoman who remembered so vividly Sheila's downward, winged rush of welcome. For several hours after his visit to the studio building he had wandered aimlessly about, then his hunger had bitten at him and he had begun to look for work. It was not difficult to find. A small restaurant displayed a need of waiters. Dickie applied. He had often "helped out" in that capacity, as in most others, at The Aura. He cited his experience, referred to Mr. Hazeldean, and was engaged. The pay seemed to him sufficient to maintain life. So much for that! Then he went to his bench and watched the day pant itself into the night. His loneliness was a pitiful thing; his utter lack of hope or inspiration was a terrible thing.