I was descending the back stairs when I heard a door open on the third floor and Elsie’s voice call out, “Regina, are you talking to anybody down there?” There was a tremor in the mezzo as it replied: “N-no. I’m just—I’m just moving about.” “Well, for Heaven’s sake go to bed! It’s after two o’clock. I never was in a house like this in all my life before. It seems to be full of people crawling round everywhere. I think I’ll come down to your mother’s bed, after all.” “Do,” was the only word I heard as I stole into the servants’ dining-room, then into the closet with shelves, where I shut the door softly. A few seconds later I was out on the cool ground, in the dark, behind the shrub. I lay there almost breathlessly, not because I was unable to get up, but because I couldn’t drag myself away. I wanted to go over the happenings of the last hour and seal them in my memory. They were both terrible to me and beautiful. I had been there some fifteen minutes when I heard the open window above me closed gently and the fastening snapped. I knew that again she was near me, though, as before, she didn’t suspect my presence. I wondered if the chances of life would ever bring us so close to each other again. Above me, where the shrub detached itself a little from the wall of the house, I could see the stars. Lying on my back, with my head pillowed on the crook of my arm, I watched them till it seemed to me they began to pale. At the same time I caught a thinning in the texture of the darkness. I got up with the silence in which I had lain down. Crossing the brick-paved yard and striding over the low wall, I was again in the vacant lot. It was not yet dawn, but it was the dark-gray hour which tells that dawn is coming. I was obliged to take more accurate precautions than before, as, crushing the tangle of nettle, burdock, fireweed, and blue succory, I crept along in the shadow of the house wall to regain the empty street. _CHAPTER III_ The city was beginning to wake. Mysterious carts and wagons rumbled along the neighboring avenues. From a parallel street came the buzz and clang of a lonely early-morning electric car. Running footsteps would have startled one if they had not been followed by the clinking of peaceful milk-bottles in back yards. Clanking off into the distance one heard the tread of solitary pedestrians bent on errands that stirred the curiosity. Here and there the lurid flames of torches lit up companies of gnomelike men digging in the roadways. Going toward Greeley’s Slip, I skirted the Park, though it made the walk longer. Under the dark trees men were lying on benches and on the grass, but for reasons I couldn’t yet analyze I refused to thrust myself among them. A few hours earlier I would have done this without thinking, as without fear; but something had happened to me that now made any such course impossible.