Finally came that chimera of an hour when she laid down her last coin for the raisin rolls. She ate them on the cot-edge. And then, because her weekly dollar-and-twenty-five-cent room rent fell due that evening, she wrapped two fresh and self-laundered waists, some white but unlacy underwear, a mound of window-dried handkerchiefs, a little knitted shoulder-shawl so long worn by her mother, her tooth-brush and tube of paste, and all her sundry little articles no less indispensable, into a white-paper package. There were left a short woolen petticoat, too cumbersome to include, the small wooden rocker and lamp with the china shade which she had rather unexplainably held out from the dealer's inventory. She closed the door softly on them one evening and, parcel in hand, tiptoed down the stonily cold halls and out into a street of long, thin, high-stooped houses. Outside in the May evening it was as black, as softly deep, as plushy as a pansy. She walked swiftly into it as if with destination. But after five or six of the long cross-town blocks her feet began to lag. She stood for a protracted moment outside a drug-store window, watching the mechanical process of a pasteboard man stropping his razor; loitered to read the violent three-sheet outside a Third Avenue cinematograph. In the aura of white light a figure in a sweater and cap nudged up to her. "Lonesome?" She moved on. In Stuyvesant Square were a first few harbingers of summer scattered here and there--couples forcing the gladsome season of the dim park bench; solitary brooders who can sit so long, so droop-shouldered, and so deeply in silence. On one of these benches, beside a slim, scant-skirted, light-spatted silhouette, Stella Schump sat finally down. It was ten o'clock. There was a sense of panic, which she felt mostly at her throat, rising in her. Then she would force herself into a state of quiet, hand on bundle, nictitating, as it were--eyes opening, eyes closing. The figure beside her slid over a bit, spreading the tiny width of skirt as if to reserve the space between them. "Workin'?" "Huh?" "Lord!" she said, indicating Second Avenue with a nod. "The lane's like a morgue to-night." "Cold, ain't it?" said Stella Schump, shivering with night damp. A figure with a tilted derby came sauntering toward them. "Lay off my territory. I seen him first." "Oh--sure--yes--all right." The place in between them was filled then, the tilted derby well forward and revealing a rear bulge of head. There was an indeterminate moment of silence broken by the slim-skirted silhouette. "Where you goin'?" Straightening, Miss Schump could hear more. "No place. Where you goin'?" "I'm cold." "Buy you a drink?" In the shaft of arc-light Miss Schump could see the little face framed in the wan curls lift and crinkle the nose to smile. "Come on."