She had not seen the automobile with the two young men in it until it stopped across the street. Even then she saw it dimly with dull eyes. But the two young men were looking up at her window, talking together, looking up again. They were getting out. They crossed the street. She heard their voices below, and a moment later her heart began to thump. They were coming up the stairs.
Something was going to happen. At last something was going to break the terrible loneliness and deadness. She stood listening, one hand at her throat, alert, breathless.
They were standing half-way up the stairs, talking. She felt indecision in the sound of their voices. One of them ran down again. There was an aching silence. Then she heard footsteps and the high, gay voice of Mrs. Brown. They were laughing together. "Oh, you Kittie!" one of the young men said. The three came up the stairs, and she heard their clattering steps and caught a word or two as they went past her room. Then the scratch of a match, and light gleamed through the crack of Mrs. Brown's door.
They went on talking. It appeared that they were arguing, coaxing, urging something. Mrs. Brown's voice put them off. There was a crash and laughter. She gathered that they were scuffing playfully. Later she heard Mrs. Brown's voice at the head of the back stairs, calling down to some one to send up some beer.
Her tenseness relaxed. She felt herself falling into bottomless depths of depression. The bantering argument was going on again. Meaningless scraps of it came to her while she undressed in the dark and crept into bed.
"Aw, come on, Kittie, be a sport! A stunning looker like that! What're you after anyhow—money?"
"Cut that out. No, I tell you. What's it to you why I won't?"
She crushed her face into the pillow and wept silently. It seemed the last unkindness of fate that Mrs. Brown should give a party and not ask her.
CHAPTER V
The next day she dressed very carefully in a fresh white waist and her Indianhead skirt and went down to the telegraph-office to ask for a job. She knew where to find the office; she had often looked at its plate-glass front lettered in blue during her lonely walks on the crowded street. Her heart thumped loudly and her knees were weak when she went through the open door.