This line of thought brought Yetta to his mind--and Beatrice's advice. He smiled at the idea. Intellectually he might admit that it would be well for him to marry. But the Yetta he remembered was a frightened little East Side girl, who had not enough sense to keep out of the clutches of a cadet. Of course she had grown up, her letters showed that. And she had been a pretty youngster. If, as Beatrice believed, she was in love with him, it might possibly work out that way in time. But he was in no mood for romance. Hunger for a life of activity kept his mind on his project of work. The few times his thoughts touched on Yetta, he wrenched them back to what the three of them might accomplish with the paper. As the ship slipped into its berth, Walter leaned over the rail and eagerly scanned the upturned faces of the welcoming crowd on the dock. When at last he convinced himself that there was no one there whom he knew, he suddenly realized that once more the hope had tripped him up. He had been looking for Mabel. He went back to the smoking-room and tried to regain his self-respect by a glass of whiskey. As the cab took him through the familiar streets, he was grimly telling himself that it would never happen again; Mabel did not exist any more. Yetta was waiting for him in his rooms. She had spent her last night there, and at eight in the morning had carried her valise--the trunk had gone before--to her new quarters on Waverly Place. She could not afford a place to herself and had gone in with another Socialist girl, Sadie Michelson, in joint control of a small flat. While she was waiting through the morning hours, she rearranged his business papers for the fiftieth time. There was a pile of receipts, year by year, each one numbered to correspond to its check. There were the check-books, each voucher pinned to its stub. The bank-book had just been balanced. It was about eleven when the cab rattled up to the door. From her seat in the window she saw him get out. Casting a quick glance over the room to reassure herself that everything was exactly as he had left it, she opened the door and went out on the landing. "Welcome home," she called down to him. It did not occur to her that what she was doing was dramatic. But the lonely hearted man who was struggling up the narrow stairs with his two grips was deeply moved by her words and the vision which greeted his upturned eyes. A flood of light came out through the door of his room and illumined her as she stood above him on the landing. "Hello," he said out loud. But to himself he said, "My God!"