There was a blob of low-pressure gaslight in the hallway, a weak and watery eye burning from a side bracket into the odor so poignant with association. Tony Eli drowned at eighteen. Her father peering behind the dresser. "Where's Lilly?" "Here I am!" Herself hugging up her knees in their stout ribbed stockings, her round gaze on the red-glass globe with the warts blown into it. There it was, that same glass globe around the puny light; and the hatrack--the one with the seat that opened for rubbers and school bags. "Gramaw, come out. Here is some one." A long cooking fork in her hand, and a puff of steam hissing out after her, Mrs. Schum peered into the hallway. She was strangely smaller, Lilly thought, as if the flesh were beginning to wither off the rack of her bones. "Mrs. Schum! Dear Mrs. Schum!" "Who's that?" "Come out, gramaw. It's no one to be afraid of." "Harry!" Her voice came cracking out like a shot. "Harry, are you in trouble?" "No--no--" "Who is hounding you? If you are here about my grandson, madam, they are all the time trying to get the best of my boy. He hasn't broken parole since old Judge Delahanty down in the Twenty-third Street Court--" "Mrs. Schum! Dear Mrs. Schum! Don't you know me? Please! Think, dearie, the little girl out in St. Louis who used to plague you for bread and butter--" The old face loosened, the eyes peering through spectacles held across the nose with a bit of twine. "It isn't--Lilly--Becker?" "Right the first time, gramaw!" "Bless my heart! Bless my soul! Let me sit down. I'm right weak. Little Lilly--Becker!" They embraced there in a hallway hardly wide enough to contain them. These two, who ordinarily might have met again, after such a span of years, in the mildest of reunions, here in each other's arms, hungrily, heartbeat to heartbeat. "Lilly, Lilly, come in here and let me look at you. Light up the front room, Harry. Well, I declare! Let me sit down. I'm right weak-kneed. Law! pretty is no name! Well, I declare!" In the little front room of chromos, folding bed with desk attachment, a bisque knickknack or two, they were finally knee to knee, Lilly's hat tossed aside, her hands clasping the old veiny ones. "Begin at the beginning, Mrs. Schum. Everything. First, tell me, dear, how long since you have heard of my folks?" "Harry, you go out in the kitchen and keep the things warm until gramaw comes out to dish up. Set the table with a cloth on, and run over to the delicatessen for a bit of cold cuts. He's a right smart help to me, Lilly. Not like some boys, too proud to help. And now--now--let me see--why, it's two years since I met your mother downtown in St. Louis before I had any idea of coming here." "How did she look?"