Fifth Avenue was less deserted than Sixth; it was: full of carriages going to and from the ball. It was about the hour when Flossie broke off her reverie in her boudoir and, ringing for her carriage, walked to her window and looked out. James Starbuck may have seen the rose light that streamed from her window; in fact, he did, and marked the brilliancy of this and all the great houses on the Avenue, with an imprecation on them for it; but he did not know Flossie Gower’s house, nor much of her, save that she almost owned the oil works over at Williamsburgh. But he stopped a moment, and looked up and down the fine street; it was going to be colder, and he foresaw that the weather would be terrible before dawn, though the ladies, well cottoned in their carriages, would give no thought to it. But the business he was on was not so safe for him at any other time; and he buttoned his overcoat about him and walked rapidly down the side street, just as Mrs. Gower’s carriage drove up at her front door. He soon got beyond the respectable streets, the level even rows of brown-stone houses standing shoulder to shoulder like well-drilled servants in a livery; the shops began, and the iron-balconied tenements, and the noise and sense of much humanity. The many sins of the pavement were charitably hidden in the snow; but even then there was a smell about the neighborhood that would have nauseated Mrs. Gower; and even in the middle of the night there was noise of living, and an undertone of working steam, throbbing still, among the sleeping places of its human fellow-laborers. Nor were they all asleep; here and there a lighted window, and what we needs must term a sound of revelry, showed that some of these, too, like their Fifth Avenue superiors, were wakeful to the pleasures of the night. But the elevated trains had ceased running, as Starbuck crossed Third Avenue: the toiling places of the human workmen, at least, were stilled, and these were not needed to take them to and from their benches in the social galley. Mankind--except indeed the policemen or other watchers who had to see that mankind did no mischief while it rested--was not at work.