Norma looked down, and joy and a vague heartache struggled within her. The little city blocks, draped with their frail tangles of fire-escapes, were as clean-cut as toys. In the streets children were screaming and racing, at the doorways women loitered and talked. Great trucks lumbered in and out among surging pedestrians, and women and children stood before the green-grocers' displays of oranges and cabbages, and trickled in and out of the markets, where cheap cuts were advertised in great chalk signs on the windows. Red brick, yellow brick, gray cement, the streets fled by; the dear, familiar streets that she and Wolf, and she and Rose, had tramped and explored, in the burning dry heat of July, in the flutter of November's first snows. "Say good-bye to it, Wolf; it will be a long time before we see New York again!" Wolf looked down, grinning. Then, as they left the city, and the dusk deepened, his eyes went toward the river, went toward the vague and waiting West. The Palisades lay, a wide bar of soft dull gray, against the paler dove-colour of the sky. Above them, bare trees were etched sharply, and beneath them was the satiny surface of the full Hudson. It was still water, and the river was smooth enough to give back a clear reflection of the buildings and the wharves on the opposite shore, and the floating ice from the north looked like rounded bunches of foam arrested on the shining waters. Suddenly the sinking sun evaded the smother of cloud, and flashed out red and shining, for only a few brilliant minutes. It caught window glass like flame, twinkled and smouldered in the mirror of the river, and lighted the under edges of low clouds with a crisp touch of apricot and pink. Wet streets shone joyously, doves rose in a circling whirl from a near-by roof, and all the world shone and sparkled in the last breath of the spring day. Then dusk came indeed, and the villages across the river were strung with increasing lights, and in the tender opal softness of the evening sky Norma saw a great star hanging. "That's a good omen--that's our own little star!" she said softly to herself. She looked up to see Wolf smiling at her, and the smile in her own eyes deepened, and she stretched a warm and comradely hand to him across the little table. THE END End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Beloved Woman, by Kathleen Norris