The street had long since fallen tranquil, the Greek church casting immense shadow. The air had immediate and sedative effect upon Miss Schump's rather distressing symptoms of unrest, but not quite allaying a certain state of mental upheaval. She had the distinct sensation of the top of her head lifted off from the eyebrows up. Her state of light-headedness took voice. "Gimme," she said, lifting the pink-mull, ankle-length skirt as if it trailed a train and marching off down-street; "now you gimme!" An entirely new lack of self-consciousness enhanced her state of giddiness. A titter seemed to run just a scratch beneath the surface of her. The passing figure of a woman in a black cape and a bulge of bundle elicited a burst of laughter which her hand clapped to her mouth promptly subdued. Awaiting the passing of a street-car, she was again prone to easy laughter. "Oh, you!" she said, quirking an eye to the motorman, who quirked back. Crossing the street, she came down rather splashily in a pool of water, wetting and staining the light slippers. "Aw!" she repeated, scolding and stamping down at them. "Aw! Aw! You!" Across from the gloomy pile of old Jefferson Market, she stood, reading up at an illuminated tower-clock, softly, her lips moving. "Nine--ten--e-lev-hun--" A dark figure slowed behind her elbow; she turned with a sense of that nearness and peered up under the lowering brim of a soft-felt hat. "Hoddado?" "Hello!" she answered, slyly. "Hello!" She peered closer. "Got a girl?" "Nope." "Blow suds?" "Where?" "Cora's." He flung back his coat, revealing a star. "You're under arrest," he said, laconically. "Solicitin'. Come on; no fuss." Her comprehension was unplumbed. "O Lord!" she said, pressing inward at her waistline to abet laughter, following him voluntarily enough, and her voice rising. "You make me laugh. You make me laugh." "That'll do," he said. "Whoop la-la!" "Now, you get noisy and watch me." He turned in rather abruptly at a side door of the dark-red pile of building which boasted the illuminated tower-clock and a jutting ell with barred windows. She drew back. "No, you don't! Aw, no, you don't! Whatta you think I yam? Cora's! Tell it to the poodles and the great Danes!" He shoved her with scant ceremony beyond the heavy door. She entered in one of the uncontrollable gales of laughter, the indoor heat immediately inducing the dizziness. "Whatta you think I yam? Tell it to the poodles and the great Danes!" Thirty minutes later, in a court-room as smeared of atmosphere as a dirty window, a bridge officer, reading from a slip of paper, singsonged to the sergeant-at-arms: "Stella Schump. Officer Charles Costello." How much more daringly than my poor pen would venture, did life, all of a backhanded, flying leap of who knows what centrifugal force, transcend for Stella Schump the vague boundaries of the probable.