“I wish I could thank you,” Dolores murmured, as she stood waiting for him to turn the knob of the door. “You can,” he said in his crisp way. “Give me the symbol.” “The--this nectarine?” “Yes. I want to sip it.” She glanced up to see if he could be joking. But evidently he was not. His eyes met hers, blue and serious as a child’s. Yet she felt vaguely disturbed to notice that, as he looked, the tip of his tongue appeared from between his teeth and wiped both lips. At once she gave him the nectarine. She was glad--so very glad--that she had something he wanted to give him. She told him so. “You are, eh?” He said no more to her by way of thanks. But she caught several words of what he added, as if to himself: “Sight, touch, the thought of taste. All--that is all.” He did not answer when she told him good-by. With an absorbed look he was turning the nectarine about in his finger-tips. He seemed in no hurry to bite into it. * * * * * To the best of her judgment, Dolores followed the instructions of her first employer. She changed the five-dollar bill in the purchase of luncheon, for she was, indeed, very hungry. Even the reminder that she now must eat all her meals alone, did not dull the edge of her appetite. It did, however, decide that the color of her new suit should be black--the only sign she might make of the desolation in her heart. Mr. Seff might not like it. Still he had said that he was “kind-hearted.” He would condone when he understood. It should have the “quality” which had been his one proviso--all the quality she could pay for after she had deducted a week’s room-rent in advance and a sufficient sum for food and incidentals. The room she sought first as the less particular purchase and found easily--a clean hall bedroom in the “refined adult” district of the middle West Forties. The lesser details of her “outfit”--a small hat, gloves, stockings and shoes--she acquired one by one. The suit she did not decide upon until ten o’clock the next morning when, conscious of the clock hands and the obligations of good taste thrust upon her, she exchanged her full residue for a tailor-made Duvetyn, reduced, according to hearsay in the sample shop, because of its “trying simplicity.” Holding her own opinion superior to the many other ambitious things which the sales-woman said about it, Dolores honestly felt that it was a suit whose distinction of cut might offset, in Mr. Seff’s opinion, its somber hue. Attired in its unpretentious luxury, her hair done low on her neck, as her father had liked it best, beneath her new toque, she reported at eleven o’clock in the studio. * * * * * At this point in the girl-shade’s recital, it was that she tore her eyes from the expectant smile of Satan the First and Last; covered her face from the hot gaze of others of her demon audience; allowed her sprightly utterance to lapse into shuddered lament.