He brought her back to the vestibule of the flat. For a moment he held both her arms at the elbow and looked at her, while with a panic fear she wondered why she could not move--wondered if he were going to kiss her. He withdrew his hands, sighed, "Good-night, Goldie. I won't be lonely to-night!" and turned abruptly away. Through all of Mrs. Golden's long, sobbing queries as to why Una had left her alone all evening Una was patient. For she knew that she had ahead of her a quiet moment when she would stand alone with the god of love and pray to him to keep her boy, her mad boy, Walter. While she heard her voice crisply explaining, "Why, you see, mother dear, I simply had to get some work done for the office--" Una was telling herself, "Some day he _will_ kiss me, and I'm _not_ sorry he didn't to-night--not now any more I'm not.... It's so strange--I like to have him touch me, and I simply never could stand other men touching me!... I wonder if he's excited now, too? I wonder what he's doing.... Oh, I'm glad, glad I loved his hands!" CHAPTER VI "I never thought a nice girl could be in love with a man who is bad, and I s'pose Walter is bad. Kind of. But maybe he'll become good." So Una simple-heartedly reflected on her way to the Subway next morning. She could not picture what he would do, now that it was hard, dry day again, and all the world panted through dusty streets. And she recklessly didn't care. For Walter was not hard and dry and dusty; and she was going to see him again! Sometimes she was timorous about seeing him, because he had read the longing in her face, had known her soul with its garments thrown away. But, timorous or not, she had to see him; she would never let him go, now that he had made her care for him. Walter was not in sight when she entered the offices, and she was instantly swept into the routine. Not clasping hands beguiled her, but lists to copy, typing errors to erase, and the irritating adjustment of a shift-key which fiendishly kept falling. For two hours she did not see him. About ten-thirty she was aware that he was prosaically strolling toward her. Hundreds of times, in secret maiden speculations about love, the girl Una had surmised that it would be embarrassing to meet a man the morning after you had yielded to his caress. It had been perplexing--one of those mysteries of love over which virgins brood between chapters of novels, of which they diffidently whisper to other girls when young married friends are amazingly going to have a baby. But she found it natural to smile up at Walter.... In this varnished, daytime office neither of them admitted their madness of meeting hands. He merely stooped over her desk and said, sketchily, "Mornin', little Goldie." Then for hours he seemed to avoid her. She was afraid. Most of all, afraid of her own desire to go to him and wail that he was avoiding her.