She let me write to Luke and tell him that she was going to visit us for a while. I told her I would take her to a school play the next night, and we looked over her things to decide what she was to wear. "Lord, Cossy," she said, "it's been months since I've went to bed thinking I was going to have any fun the next day." Afterward I found Mrs. Bingy sitting with her head on her hand. "I wonder," she said, "if I done it." "What, Mrs. Bingy?" I asked. "When any woman in Katytown leaves her husband, I'll always think that if I hadn't gone, maybe----" "Mrs. Bingy," I said, "suppose you had stayed. Either he'd have murdered you and the baby, too, maybe, or else you might have had another child or two--with a drunken brute for a father. If you've helped anybody like you to get away, you be glad!" "I don't know what to make of you sometimes, Cossy," she said. "Sometimes what you say sounds so nice I bet it's wicked." She took the child, gathered him up with a long sweep of her arm and tossed him, with one arm, on her shoulder. She was huge and brown, as she used to be; but now her life had rounded out her gauntness, and she looked fed and rested and peaceful. To see her in the little sitting-room of the flat, busy and happy and cheerful, was like seeing her soul with another body, or her body with another soul, or both. I never got over the wonder of it. The school play gave Lena nothing of what she pathetically called "fun." And when she went with me to the factory dances, she turned up her nose at the men, not one of whom was, she said, a "dresser." She told me that she hated to be with anybody who knew more than she did. In a fortnight she went back to Luke's aunt to stay, I suspected, as long as her small money held out at the motion-picture shows. CHAPTER XIII It was just before Lena left us that Mrs. Carney telephoned one day for me to come to her house to dinner on the following night. "He's back!" I said to myself as I hung up the receiver; for by now Mrs. Carney had guessed something of John Ember's place in my life, though we had never spoken of it. But he was not back, now, any more than he had been all the other times that I had leaped at the hope, in these three years. It was some one else who had come back. Mr. Arthur Carney was in Europe that year, and I went there that night without thinking that there was such a person as he in the world, so long had I forgotten his existence. But Mrs. Carney told me that she had had, the day before, a telegram to say that he had landed in New York and would be at home by the end of the week. While we were waiting for dinner to be announced, he unexpectedly appeared in her drawing-room. And he said to her, before all those people: "You see, my dear, I've come to surprise you. I've come to see how well you amuse yourself while I am away."