After a time she went back drearily to the kraut-smelling restaurant, to the work she had thought to leave forever, that day when Toby had not come for her. She went out twenty times every morning, and oftener as it wore on towards evening, to look at his closed stand, always with a choking hope in her heart, always to drag leaden feet back into the restaurant. Several times, her breath failing for shame, she approached Italians in the street, or where there was one to be found at a stand of any sort she stopped and made a purchase, and asked for some word of Toby--without result, always. She knew no other way to seek for him. One day, as she trudged homeward, two coloured women met on the pavement in front of her, exchanged greetings, and continued for a little way together. “How you enjoyin' you' money, dese fine days, Miz Mo'ton?” inquired one, with a laugh that attested to the richness of the joke between the two. “Law, honey,” answered the other, “dat good luck di'n' las' ve'y long. Dey done shut off my supplies.” “No!” “Yas'm, dey sho did. Dat man done tuck de smallpox; all on 'em ketched it, ev'y las' one, off'n dat no 'count Joe Cribbins, an' now dat dey got de new pes'-house finish', dey haul 'em off yon'eh, yas'day. Reckon dat ain' make no diffunce in my urrant runnin'. Dat Dago man, he outer he hade two day fo' dey haul 'em away, an' ain' sen' no mo' messages. So dat spile _my_ job! Hit dass my luck. Dey's sho' a voodoo on Lize Mo'ton!” Bertha, catching but fragments of this conversation, had no realization that it bore in any way upon the mystery of Toby; and she stumbled homeward through the twilight with her tired eyes on the ground. When she opened the door of the tiny room, the landlady's lean black cat ran out surreptitiously. The bird-cage lay on the floor, upside down, and of its jovial little inhabitant the tokens were a few yellow feathers. Bertha did not know until a month after, when Leo Vesschi found her at the restaurant and told her, that out in the new pest-house, that other songster and prisoner, the gay little chestnut vender, Pietro Tobigli, had called lamentably upon the name of his God and upon “Libra Ogostine,” and now lay still forever, with the corduroy waistcoat and its precious burden tightly clenched to his breast. Even in his delirium they had been unable to coax or force him to part from it for a second. THE NEED OF MONEY