Flint vouchsafed no answer. He posted out and up Broadway as if he were in mad haste. Then suddenly recollecting that his chief purpose was to kill time, he moderated his stramming gait to a stroll. At a jeweller's on Union Square he paused, and turned in, ostensibly to order some cards; but passing out he stopped surreptitiously before the case of jewels. The rubies interested him most. How well they would look against a certain gray-silk gown! Should he ever dare-- He caught a meaning smile on the face of the clerk, and bolted out of the door. He paused again at a fashionable florist's shop tucked deftly in among the theatres of central Broadway. The men at the counter were busily engaged over curiously incongruous tasks,--one binding up a cross of lilies, another a wreath for a baby's coffin, and a third preparing a beribboned basket, gay with chrysanthemums, for a dinner-table. Heedless, like us all, of every one's experiences but his own, Flint stood by, waiting impatiently for the clerk who was putting the last lily in the cross. From the great heaps of roses which stood about he selected an overflowing boxful of the longest-stemmed and most fragrant. The clerk smiled as he watched his recklessness. "I've seen 'em like that," he said to himself, "and two or three years after they'll come in and ask for carnations, and say it doesn't matter if they _were_ brought in yesterday." Unconscious of the florist's cynical reflections, Flint tossed him his card, and emerged once more to add one to the moving mass of humanity on the street. At Madison Square he dropped in at the club and looked over the latest numbers of "Life" and "Punch." Still time hung heavy on his hands. He looked at his watch; it was just five o'clock,--exactly the time when that objectionable Blathwayt was to call in Stuyvesant Square. Still two hours before dinner. He left the club, crossed over to Broadway, and jumped onto the platform of the moving cable-car at imminent peril to life and limb. He rode on in a sort of daze, till he was roused by a sudden jerk and the conductor's call of: "Central Park--all out here!" Moving with the moving stream of passengers, he stepped out of the car, and refusing a green transfer ticket he crossed the street and entered the park at the Seventh Avenue gate, where the path makes a sudden dip from the level of the street. The sun was near its setting, and the chilly wind had swept the walks clear of tricycles and baby carriages. The gray-coated guardian of the peace blinked at him from his sentry box. Otherwise he had the park to himself, and found an intense pleasure in the solitude, the keen air, and the sharp outlines of the dreary autumn branches against the gorgeous sky.