Luck was with her. And Ikey sat down on the lea of the little cliff, quite alone, spread out her buns,--you got three for ten cents these catastrophe days,--and faced the situation. The landlady had raised the rent. Ikey could have screamed with laughter over the situation--if only the matter were not so vital. "This'll make the thirteenth move for you, Ikey, my love, since the eighteenth of April--and the thirteenth move is bound to be unlucky. But you'll have to go, sure as Fate; for you can't stand another raise. The Wandering Jew gentleman takes the road again." She pursed her lips as she said it. She had invented the appelation for herself after nine moves in three months. "I don't know what his name really was," she confessed--there was no one else to talk to, no one she cared for, so she talked, sub voice, to herself--"but it must have been Ikey. I'm sure it was Ikey--and that I look just like him." And deriving much comfort from this witticism, she went on her way. "Ikey, the Wandering Jew, on the move again," she repeated. "But where to move _to_, that is the question. It's funny what a difference money makes"--her eyebrows went up--"or rather, lack of it. I've never considered that until recently." Then her eyes fell on her shoes. They had been very swagger little shoes in the beginning--Ikey had made rather a specialty of footgear--but they were her "escape" shoes; and their looks told the tale of their wanderings. Also, she had had no others since. She wriggled her toes. "You'll be poking through before long, looking at the stars," she told them severely. "Imagine your excitement." And her suit. [Illustration: "'I'VE BEEN FOLLOWING YOU EVER SINCE YOU LEFT YOUR OFFICE,' HE SAID"] Ikey looked away so as not to see the perfect cut of it, the perfect fit of it, the utter shabbiness of it. It was her "escape" suit, too. She had slept on the hills in it to the tune of dynamiting and the flare of the burning city. She would never have another like it--never. For her job---- Her job. She leaned back suddenly and closed her eyes. Her job. The rage of this noon was coming back again; rage, and with it a strange, new sensation--fear. She had never known fear before, not even during the earthquake days. "Only at the dentist's," she told herself, giggling half hysterically behind closed lids. And back of it all--back of the landlady's unconcealed dislike and latest slap, back of the disintegration of a wardrobe that could not be replaced, and the question as to whether her "job" had not become an impossibility since to-day--and that job simply could not become an impossibility: one had to live--back of all this was the dull hurt, smothered and always coming again, that Bixler McFay had not taken the trouble to look her up when his regiment came through on the way to Manila. "You may as well face that, too, while you're about it," Ikey observed sarcastically. She opened her eyes with a snap and bit into the first bun.