The inscription was in English, but when he had finished reading it, the dead woman's son said, under his breath, the Lord's Prayer in the language of Luther, as she had taught it him. "She liked me to pray," he shamefacedly explained to the circumambient atmosphere, as if prayer in any tongue were a compromise with his principles. "Und vhile I'm aboud it, I mighd as vell use de old langwage. If the Herr Gott listens at all, He'd hear it some besser in de vay She said it." And then he resumed his hat and his anthem, and returned to town. Katie Flanagan was waiting for him as he came hurrying up the steps from the subway at Park Place--the piquant, pretty girl of the photograph, in black, because her parents had died not long since, but in black just as elaborate as her slender purse would permit, because she knew the full value of her raven hair and blossoming cheeks and tender eyes of Irish blue. "Ach," gasped Hermann, "hof I kep' you a long time vaitin'?" "Only about as long as you mostly do," she answered. Her voice was like her eyes, and she spoke with but the charming hint of a Galway brogue. The German's cheeks burned with humiliation. "I'm sorry," he apologized. "I god up early to be on dime, bud de train vas lade from the cem't'ry in." She understood and smiled. "It's only five minutes I've been here," she confessed. "Und I brought you a few bosies, Katie. I d'ought maybe----" "Oh!" she seized the carnations with a laugh of delight, and buried her nose in them. "It's good y'are to think of such things, Hermann--and a bad lad that y'are to spend the money so!" They were making their way toward the Bridge, the sturdy Hoffmann shouldering a passage through the momentarily swelling Sunday morning crowd. "Dot liddle makes nussing," he proudly protested. "To-morrow I begin ad my new tshob." "But that," said Katie, "won't pay you hardly wan dollar a week more'n the brewery did. I dunno, but I think----" There, however, her protest, for the moment, ended. They were caught, clinging together, in the whirlpool of the entrance; carried nearly off their feet, rushed by the ticket-window with a quick exchange of small coin, and, a few minutes later, were battling their way among the press into a waiting Coney Island train. In the last charge, Hermann, his lips puckered in the battle-hymn, did heroic service. While Katie hung tightly to one arm, he used manfully the elbow of the other; pushed a guard to the right; shoved two cigarette-smoking youths to the left; wriggled through the already crowded platform and shot into one of the coveted "cross-seats." Much of the park would not be open for a month or more to come, but New York was already clamoring for its playground.