Jimmie Wardwell, looking into the dry, pained depths of the girl's gray-blue eyes, saw that she was not going to be angry in any ordinary way. He had hurt her. And he was going to be punished. He stood, suddenly quiet and sober, awaiting his verdict. "You will have to leave the house, Mr. Wardwell," she said at last, very quietly. "You must make your own reason. I do not wish to be obliged to tell mother." She had spoken with a grave, settled finality which left Jimmie Wardwell silent and without defense. The girl dropped the matter where she had finished it. Nor did she return to the other matter about which she had come to the room. She crossed to the typewriter and stood looking down reading the story that showed half written there. "I thought you were going to begin on your own work," she said, ignoring everything that had passed. Wardwell knew that he had been ordered out of his boarding house as definitely as if his trunk had been deposited on Eighteenth Street. But he was willing to forget that for the instant and to answer on the new ground that she had chosen. "I did do something on the book," he said. "But what's the use! I can't put the time on it. I'd never finish it. I have to live. And that"----he pointed angrily at the paper on the machine----"that's the only kind of stuff that anybody'll pay me for! I couldn't sell that if it wasn't ancient and bearded!" "You couldn't sell that," the grave critic answered judiciously, "if it wasn't good of it's kind. But you don't love it. So you always hate to have to do it, and you must get away from it." "Yes," said Wardwell, "I must." But it was plain that he was not thinking of her wise counsel about himself and his work. He was thinking of this child--She was no more in time, just a year out of Julia Richman High School. Yet it was a woman's personality that looked out of her child's dancing eyes. He did think of returning to the question of his leaving. But he remembered that there was no question. It was not a matter of appeasing her anger, of explaining. She knew. She understood. And she had spoken her decision. "I wonder," the girl said, crossing to look down into the street. "Mother is very long in coming. And she never delays. Could anything happen to her between here and Sixteenth Street. But, of course, what _could_ happen! She goes and comes every morning. And everybody knows her." "I don't know," said Jimmie darkly, peering doubtfully down into the street. "This great city is full of designing men. I've often wondered how you let her go about the streets in broad day unchaperoned. A lovely woman, an altogether delectable woman!" he proceeded, warming up to his nonsense. "Why, she's not safe a minute!" "In fact," he announced cheerfully, "I've often thought of running away with her myself."