"At five o'clock, Mary."
"I'll try, Miss Lennox."
"Promise."
Mary stepped to the door. She looked up and put out her hand, but, although Marian saw this, and started to respond, the settlement-worker's hand fell back to her side. Mary seemed first to observe and then not at all to have observed it.
"I promise," she said quietly, and left the room and the house.
Inside, Marian was looking at her hand as if, because it had refused to seek that of the woman who, she concluded, had shared Rose Légère's intimacy with Dyker, it had been scorched by the new passion aflame in her own heart. Outside, Mary, tramping the evening street, saw, in her memory of that hand withheld, a hand pointing her definitely away from the keeping of her promise, pointing her onward down the street as the place where, for the future, she must live and work.
XXIII
KATIE'S DAY
The election came, and went in just the way that everybody expected it to go. Wesley Dyker's political craft, along with many others, was carried on the inrushing waves of his party's success to the haven where he had desired it to rest, and the prosperity that had raised the price of votes to five dollars apiece immediately resumed its unostentatious levy upon the voters against the next election. The defeated candidates forgot their so recent denunciations and congratulated their victorious opponents; the victorious opponents forgot their tinsel pledges and resumed the safe and sure business of government for revenue only, and the population of New York, like the population of most cities, forgot all the good things that had been pledged it, and turned its energies to the everyday task of taking what it could get.
Meanwhile Carrie Berkowicz, homely and hopeless, pursued, with a dogged earnestness, the path that conditions had hewn for her, and always she pursued it not alone. As the waiting beast prowls behind the slowly weakening traveler lost in a jungle, as the bird of prey circles calmly above the wounded man in the forest, as both beast and bird stand by until there comes the moment when strength can no longer oppose them, so, day after day, rarely speaking, but always watching, there followed in this girl's footsteps the dark young man with curling hair and shining teeth, who had accosted her on Waverley Place. He seemed to watch for her morning entrance upon the street, and to be the last to see her when she dragged her wasting body into the tenement at night. Much of the time he dogged her like a foul shadow. She would pass him in a doorway, she would see him lounging at a corner, she would catch glimpses of him across a crowded street. There were times when she feared to look up lest she should have to answer that prosperous leer and ornate bow; there were others, at last, when, as his well-fed body brushed by her, she almost plucked at his sleeve with her hungry hands. He never stopped, but sometime, she knew, he would stop; he never said more than "Good-morning" or "Good-evening,", but sometime, sometime soon, he would, she knew, say more.