Though the streets were for the most part lined with small wooden houses, there was an occasional more pretentious one of brick, and sometimes a larger frame dwelling. It was in one of these last, a double, three-storied house which accommodated several families and one or two single lodgers, that Mr. Bixby had found an abode for them--a sitting-room, a kitchen, and at the back a bedroom. The rooms were close and the furniture was cheap and ugly, but what did that matter? The porch outside was clothed with a cottage vine, a strip of zinnias and cosmos marched in the tiny front-yard, and at the back was another attempt at a flower bed. “Oh, Tim! Oh, Tim!” she cried. She stood in the middle of the small domain and turned slowly about. “Oh, Tim! It’s _ours_!” The rooms ceased thereat to be mere rooms; with that rush of emotion her heart opened to them, they entered, and the place became her home. But he would not let her linger there now. Depositing her bags, he urged her out again. “Come on,” he cried. “I got to show you ’fore it’s too late.” He turned into a street running south, which after a few minutes’ walk came to an end in a small bit of parkway where were a row of benches and a stone balustrade. “There now! Look!” he cried. It was his triumph. All the cheap sordidness of the city ended abruptly here. Beyond was space--a deep drop to the stretches of the James River below. Overhead was the infinite breadth and height of the sky, and far across the river, whose tawny waters were tufted by little islands, were green stretches of open country. He drew her down to a bench. “This is the jumping-off place,” he told her. “I thought you could come here an’ kind of stretch and breathe when things got too close on you back there in the streets.” It was amazing. The mean streets reached almost to them, fenced off by just that little edge of open ground, yet all one had to do was to turn the back upon them to enter another world, a place of space and freedom, of green islands, clean air, the smell of the water, and the yellow flow of it. Here, too, they found the secret places of their own souls. The twilight and then the dark came slowly down. They sat together upon the bench, their eyes rested by the open stretches before them, their hands close clasped, their bodies touching, and their soft, half-whispered words feeling out toward one another, as they brought to light all the past tragedies of their lives, all their sorrowful timidities. Here was one at last to whom everything might be told, who would listen, who would perfectly understand. They paused often to say in whispered wonder, “Why, I never told that to anyone before!”