"If you will excuse me now, please, I--won't, intrude any longer." "Good night, dear; it was just lovely. Good night," joined in everybody, too kindly. Walking out of that room, Lilly was conscious suddenly of passing through a prolonged stare, especially from Mrs. Neugass, who leaned forward slightly in her chair--a stare that prompted her somehow to quicken her departure almost to a run. * * * * * Out of a night that had flowed around her in a bitter sort of blackness that fairly threatened to drown her, she floated up toward morning to an exhausted doze, her face tear-lashed and her breathing sucked in sobbily as she slept. It was out of this that she awoke suddenly to a bombardment of knocks at her door. "Come!" she cried, sitting up rather alarmedly in bed, and holding the blanket over her chest. She was lovely and disheveled with sleep, her whiteness whiter because of the most delicately darkened oyster shells beneath her eyes. It was Mrs. Neugass. She was pleasantly shapeless again in cotton stuff, her bosom bulging down and over the jerked-in apron strings. "Wait, I'll get up and close the window, Mrs. Neugass!" "You doan' need to," she said, slamming down the window herself, opening the floor register, and seating herself rigidly on the chair that faced the bed. "I want a little talk with you, blease." "Why, yes, Mrs. Neugass!" A wave of memory and a sense of physical misery swept over Lilly so that it was difficult for her to force the smile. But she did, sitting up in bed and hugging her knees with bare shining arms. With nervousness patent in every move, Mrs. Neugass sat forward, pleating and unpleating a little section of her apron. "I guess you know it, Miss Lilly, that with all the honors we got by our daughter, we're still blain, respegtable beoble." "Of course--" "For fifteen years in one business in one neighborhood we've such a standing that from three blocks around they come to my husband he should keep their savings. My girls--I can say it on a bible--more than anything around them was always respegtability." "But why--" "If I'm mistaken, Miss Luella, and blease God I should be, then excuse me for a foolish old woman, but is--is everything all right with you, Miss Luella?" "Mrs. Neugass, I--What do you mean?" "I took you in for a student, a girl alone from her home town, but not once since you're with us--I can't help it I got eyes--so much as a postal card. All right, I said time and time again to my husband, she don't have friends to come and call on her, because she's a stranger in New York. Neither did my Millie have so many friends, I guess, the first few weeks in Munich. But no letters--not a line! I know _goys_ ain't so strong on family ties, but once in a while a letter--" "I don't quite see where the matter of my correspondence can be of interest to you, Mrs. Neugass."