Katie surprised even herself: she laughed. "So I did!" she said. "An' of course I was lyin' an' of course you knowed it. Oh, well, Woods, man, hold 'em off for forty-eight hours, an' if I don't get work then, I'll--well, I won't bother you no more." In the shadowy hallway, she felt his eyes studying her less with evil than with wonder. "There ain't many girls with your looks, Miss Flanagan, as'd be out of a job as long as you've been." Katie shrugged her shoulders: she was beyond resentment. "The more pity to 'em," she said. "Not many," repeated Mr. Woods. There was an awkward silence. The collector paused because he wanted her fully to weigh an implication that he honestly considered to contain sound advice, and Katie refrained from further comment for the excellent reason that she had nothing to say. It was Woods that at last took up the broken thread. "I'll tell you what I'll do, Miss Flanagan," he not unkindly concluded; "I'll hold 'em off till to-morrow evenin', an' if by then you can pay me a chunk on account, it'll be all right; if you can't----" He stood aside, and Katie clapped him warmly on the shoulder. "You're doin' your best, Woods," she said, "an' I thank you for it. I'll get the job someways, but not the way you think, an'--an' I thank you." Only half-way to the corner she met the girl that lived across the hall from her, Carrie Berkowicz, a homely, round-cheeked, brown-haired Lithuanian Jewess, who worked in a shirtwaist factory on Tenth Street. "Say, Katie"--Carrie prided herself on her colloquial English, as she learned it in the night-classes in the Rand School--"were you still looking for a job?" Katie nodded. "Well, say, I just this minute passed Emma Schrem, an' she says Cora Costigan is quitting her job at the Lennox store to-day to be married to-morrow. Why don't you pull up there and try for it?" Try for it? Katie could scarcely stop to thank her rescuer before she had turned northward. There was no longer left her even the five cents necessary for carfare, and, though she was faint with hunger and shaking with fear lest her tardiness should lose her this slim opportunity, she was forced to walk. Facing a fine rain blown in from the Sound, she walked up Second Avenue, and finally, turning westward to the shopping quarter now crowded with salesgirls on their hurried way to work, she entered, by the dark employés' door, the large department-store of Joshua N. Lennox, merchant and philanthropist. A dozen quick inquiries rushed her, wet and weary, but flushed by her walk and radiant with the excitement of the race, into the presence of the frock-coated, pale-faced, suave-mouthed Mr. Porter, the tall, thin man, with the precision of a surgeon and the gravity of a Sunday-school superintendent, to whose attention, it appeared, such pleas as hers must be brought. Mr. Porter, who had gray side-whiskers, which he stroked with white hands, listened in judicial calm to what she had to say.