Across the areaway the straight shafts of the setting sun caught the dirty little window-panes of the nearby squalid rooms and turned them to a shining glory. The rays were reflected into Katie's own room; they burnished the cheap paper into cloth of gold, they touched the floor and gilded it, they made of the rickety table a thing of splendor, and of the worn chairs fairy thrones. Hermann's blonde head was crowned with a halo, and as he looked at the girl, against the background of those yellow windows like a Madonna against the background that the Etruscan painters loved, he saw in her eyes what he had never seen before. In the momentary struggle the coils of her black hair had loosened and fallen below her waist. They framed a face no longer strong with restraint, handsome from the flush of battle against the world, no longer set and self-reliant, but a face through which shone the light of the life-force, the motive-power of the universe, a beautiful face, white, frightened, wonderful. "Can--can you really love me?" She scarcely said the words. Rather her lips formed them with no voice behind. But he had heard her before her lips so much as moved. "Ach," he cried, "I hof alvays lofed you, Katie, but now it is somesing new und more. Katie, I sink--I belief sings I neffer belief before, und I sink it must be der blessing of Gott dot I can _see_ in you." "An' there won't be anny other woman?" "You are _all_ vomen, Katie." She raised her head. "Yes, Hermann," she said, "I think I will be all women for you. I will be all you want. I will work an' share, good luck an' bad. I never before was glad I knew how to work, but now I _will_ be all you want--all, _all_!" He put her hand to his lips, and held it there an instant: Fifth Avenue does these things, casually, no better than the Bowery, when the Bowery has a mind for them. "Katie," he whispered. She took her hand away. She tried to laugh a little, but the laughter, clear and silvery, caught suddenly in her throat. Her mouth twisted, and she raised the hand and put her lips where his had been. Reeling with the tremor of that sight, his arms recaptured her, and this time held her fast. She swayed and yielded. Her own arms answered his, and his lips met, for the first time freely, the lips she had so bravely kept for him. The case against Mirka was then and there dismissed, and the High Court handed down a final decision _in re_ Hoffmann _vs._ Flanagan. XXIV MARIAN'S WAY Wesley Dyker looked with unaffected approval about the second-story front room in Rivington Street. He saw the calmly colored walls, the excellent mats upon the floor, the ordered writing-desk and, near the center, the heavy library-table, covered with carefully piled magazines. "Hello!" he said, nodding easily to the woman that stood motionless before him. The woman's answer was not ready, but Dyker, whose eyes were on surroundings almost as animate, pursued: