With a display of his large bills and another flurry of attendants, they left the restaurant, walking among the gayly dressed and loudly laughing people at the tables, passing down the heavily carpeted stairs, and entering another pulsing motor-car. Max leaned out of the door and gave an address that Mary did not hear; the chauffeur threw forward the metal clutch, and the automobile shot ahead on its journey.
They went for some time under the still hammering elevated; then turned through a quieter and darker street; threaded rapidly, twisting hither and yon, a dozen other highways and byways and at length drew up at their destination. Max leaped lightly to the pavement and tossed the driver a bill.
"Neffer mind the change," he said, and had scarcely helped Mary to dismount before the car had snorted away into the night, leaving the pair of young lovers in the scarcely broken darkness and in a silence that seemed surrounded by a dim, distant rumble of city-sound.
The girl could see little of her whereabouts. She observed only that she was in a slumbering block of blinded dwelling-houses, a scene different from any that New York had thus far presented to her. One distant, sputtering arc-light succeeded only in accentuating the gloom; underfoot the way resounded to the slightest tread; from the little patch of inky sky into which the roofs blended above, a bare handful of anæmic stars twinkled drowsily, and, on both sides, from corner to corner, the uniform, narrow houses rose in somber repetition, each with its brief, abrupt flight of steps, each with its blank windows, each seemingly asleep behind its mask.
More than this, indeed, Mary's tired eyes could have had no time to observe, for Max's strong fingers were at once curled under her armpit, and she was hurried up to one of the innumerable mute doorways. He pressed a button hidden somewhere in the wall, and, almost immediately, the door swung open.
The pair looked from darkness upon a rosy twilight. Under the feeble rays of the pink-shadowed stairway, there were just visible the outlines of a full-blown form.
"Hello, Rosie!" cried Max as, quickly snapping the door behind him, he passed by his charge and seized an invisible hand. "You vaited up for us un' come to the door yourself! That vas good of you."
In spite of her Gallic cognomen, Mrs. Rose Légère replied in the tone and vernacular of Manhattan Island.
"Sure I waited for you," she answered. "But don't talk so loud: you'll wake the whole family.—And is this the little lady, eh?"
Half disposed to resist, Mary felt herself gently propelled forward by Max, and then enveloped in an ample, strangely perfumed embrace, while two full warm lips printed a kiss upon her cool young cheek.