"Yes, dearie; but it's a long way off. See, it's just gettin' light through the crack in the shade." "Don't raise it, Cottie. It's a sin to let in the light, with him layin' there and dead." "Darlin', it ain't goin' to hurt him, and the lamp's low. See; there ain't no harm in raisin' it--look how light it's gettin'!" Off toward the east dawn trembled on the edge of eternity and sent up, as if the earth were lighting the horizon, a pearlish light shotted with pink. A smattering of stars lingered and trembled as though cold. They paled; dawn grew pinker, and the black village, with its naked trees standing darkly against the sky, sent up wispy spirals of smoke. A derrick in the jagged bowl of the quarry moved its giant arms slowly, and a steam-whistle shrieked. The New York accommodation hallooed to the trembling dawn and tore through Slateville. The sisters pressed their white faces close to the cold pane and watched it rush into the sunrise. A cock crowed to the dawn, and, from afar, another. A dirt-team rumbled up the road, and the steam-whistle from the quarry blew a second reveille. "You--you take the accommodation, darlin'. It's cheaper, and you'll be feelin' scary about the flyer for a while. You can catch it down by Terre Haute at five-thirty-one, Monday morning--eh, darlin'?" "So--so soon, Cottie--only three days after, and him hardly cold." "Don't let's drag it out, darlin'." "Oh, Cottie, I'll be waitin' for you! There won't be a day that I won't be waitin' for you. There's nothin' I love like you." Their faces were close and wet with tears, and the first ray of sun burnished their heads and whitened their white bosoms. "Kiss me, Cottie." "Della--Della!" "My little sister!" "You're goin', Della--try to think, darlin', what it means--you're goin'." "'Sh-h-h, dearie--'sh-h-h. Yes--I--I'm goin'." And in the room adjoining John Blaney lay dead with a dent in his head. * * * * * The city has a thousand throats, its voice is like a storm running on the wind, and like ship-high waves plunging on ship-high rocks, and like unto the undertone of lost souls adrift in a sheol of fog and water. The voice of the city knows none of the acoustic limitations of architects and prima donnas. Its dome is as high as fifty-story sky-scrapers, and its sounding-board the bases of a thousand thousand tired brains. It penetrates the Persian-velvet hangings of the most rococo palace toward which the sight-seeing automobile points its megaphone, and beats against brains neurotic with the problems of solid-gold-edged bonds and solid-gold cotillion favors. It is the birth-song of the tenement child and the swan-song of the weak. It travels out over fields of new-mown hay and sings to the boy at the plow. It shouts to the victor and whispers to the stranger.