Bruce Visigoth found her so, although, at his entrance, she sprang from the mound of her misery, violently simulating affairs at a lower drawer. "Hello!" he cried, then, eying her crumpled cheek and the lane of tears: "Ah, I say now! Come, come; this won't do. What's up?" She rubbed her bare hand furiously across the ravages of her sharp depression. "Nothing. I--I guess I'm blue," she said, in a half laugh. "Something wonderful has happened to Zoe, and I--it's made me so happy, I'm blue. That's it--so--happy--I'm blue." "What is the wonderful thing?" She told him. It was then he caught her hands. "Lilly, marry me! Make it possible! Don't let the years lead you into a blind alley. You are bound inevitably to lose a child like Zoe--to life. That's why you are so unaccountably blue, Lilly; the writing is on the wall." "No!" she cried, plunging past him, her hat in hand and her throat now a cave of the winds for her unreleased sobs. "The years have brought me, Zoe. She is my fulfillment. You can't frighten me--life cannot take her from me. I'm not afraid--only, I can't bear anything to-night, least of all from you--" "Lilly, you're not--" "Let me go! I'm all right--only tired--that's all. Terribly--terribly--tired." She was presently on her homeward way, walking swiftly, almost, it would seem, a little madly, through a May evening that hung as thinly as one thickness of a veil. At Seventy-second Street she veered suddenly and rather unaccountably to Riverside Drive and down into a ledge of park that dips like a terrace to the Hudson River. An asphalt walk led in festoons from high parky nooks that sheltered couples, down to the water-slapped edge of docks, where the tidey surf had a thick, inarticulate lisp, as if what it had to say might only be comprehended from the under side. At one of the lowermost curves of the walk, the width of a brace of railroad tracks between, a coal dock jutted out into the river. Across these forbidden tracks, indeed, as if they did not exist, Lilly wandered. At the last inch of dock, so that the water licked up at her shoes, Lilly stood poised. Not, it is true, with the diver's blade thrust of arms, but rather the unskilled, the indeterminate movement of one vaguely prompted from the unfathomable places of the heart. It was upon that move that something, a terrifying restraint, laid hold of Lilly's jangling nerve ends. "Hey there! None o' that to-night!" A dockman's hand, hairy as an Airedale, had her by the arm, and somewhere at her brow, cooling it, the fine hand of Bruce Visigoth, pressing her against him, and at that touch Lilly's hysteria shot up like a geyser. "Don't!" she screamed, and would have struggled for the edge except for the two firm hands now pressing her arms to her sides. "Lilly, for God's sake, get hold of yourself!" "Let me go! Let me go!"