She was recovering, whose high spirit and recuperative powers were to him then and always remained a marvelous thing; and she was bending forth from the body of the hansom to welcome him with a smile that in a twinkling made radiant the world to him who stood in a gloomy side street of New York at three o'clock of a summer's morning,--a good hour and a half before the dawn. For up there in the tower of the sky-scraper he had as much as told her of his love; and she had waited; and now--and now he had been blind indeed had he failed to read the promise in her eyes. Weary she was and spent and overwrought; but there is no tonic in all the world like the consciousness that where one has placed one's love, there love has burgeoned in response. And despite all that she had suffered and endured, the happiness that ran like soft fire in her Veins, wrapping her being with its beneficent rapture, had deepened the color in her cheeks and heightened the glamour in her eyes. And he stood and stared, knowing that in all time to no man had ever woman seemed more lovely than this girl to him: a knowledge that robbed his mind of all other thought and his tongue of words, so that to her fell the task of rousing him. "Please," she said gently--"please tell the cabby to take me home, Mr. Maitland." He came to and in confusion stammered: Yes, he would. And he climbed up on the step with no other thought than to seat himself at her side and drive away for ever. But this time the cabby brought him to his senses, forcing him to remember that some measure of coherence was demanded even of a man in love. "Where to, sir?" "Eh, what? Oh!" And bending to the girl: "Home, you said--?" She told him the address,--a number on Park Avenue, above Thirty-fourth Street, below Forty-second. He repeated it mechanically, unaware that it would remain stamped for ever on his memory, indelibly,--the first personal detail that she had granted him: the first barrier down. He sat down. The cab began to move, and halted again. A face appeared at the apron,--Hickey's, red and moon-like and not lacking in complacency: for the man counted of profiting variously by this night's work. "Excuse me, Mr. Maitland, 'nd"--touching the rim of his derby--"yeh, too, ma'am, f'r buttin' in--" "Hickey!" demanded Maitland suddenly, in a tone of smoldering wrath, "what the--what do you want?" "Yeh told me tuh call round to-morrow, yeh know. When'll yeh be in?" "I'll leave a note for you with O'Hagan. Is that all?" "Yep--that is, there's somethin' else...." "Well?"