But through decay, poverty, and dirt the love of beauty still spoke. It met Viola's eye and gave her its message in the touch of green, in the brilliant blossom that rejoiced in its existence on balcony-rail and window-ledge. Flowers were the one ornament that was cheap. They hung from windows, and stretched out frail blossoms from shadowed angles. They grew bushily in glad luxuriance on sunny roofs, and put forth buds of perfect beauty behind broken, grimy panes. When the sun touched them they bloomed, bravely, splendidly, prodigally, giving forth their best. Old verandas, sagging under their weight of decrepitude and household overflow, held their gardens. In the most menacing of the alleys there was the gleam of flower and leaf from starch- and soap-boxes on the ledges below unwashed, unshuttered casements. Viola had seen children leaning over the sills as they searched with pouting, busy gravity for a bud to pluck; and sometimes she caught a glimpse of the coarse, painted face of some humble Aspasia of the quarter bending over her window-garden, where the flowers bloomed as luxuriantly for her as they did for the children on the floors above. With the advance of winter and its multiplying gaieties, Viola's engagements at the florist's grew more and more frequent, her hours longer. Her employer realized that she was a more than ordinarily valuable acquisition, and constantly demanded the assistance of her skill and taste. She was often detained till long after dark, when she made a weary way up the hill to the cold dinner that had been awaiting her since six o'clock. On one of these nights, at the beginning of the rainy season, she walked past her destiny unseeing and unsuspecting. It had been a lowering day. The clouds lying low and gray over the city bulged with rain which did not fall. The wind was moist and sweet, smelling as if it had blown over miles of rich earth, quick with germinating seed. People were out with umbrellas, and the children as they came home from school were protected by mackintoshes and rubbers. * * * * * Gault, walking up Kearney Street in the gray of the late afternoon, observed his sister-in-law's coupé standing at the curb before a popular confectioner's. As he approached, Letitia emerged from the shop, her hands full of small boxes, and crossed the sidewalk to the carriage. He encountered her half-way, and paused with her by the carriage door for a moment's greeting. Gault did not see as much of his brother's household as formerly. They knew of Viola Reed's disappearance; and Letitia from delicacy and Maud from a sense of guilty embarrassment refrained from urging him to reëstablish himself on the old footing of careless intimacy.