IT was early April, a dark and rainy afternoon. Pidge had been in the tin factory three months. For four weeks the manuscript of the _Lance_ had lain in the bureau drawer of the little upper room in Harrow Street, not being given a second submittal. The secret was still kept. Richard Cobden had not spoken of the story since his report that Sunday afternoon to Miss Claes. There seemed an astonishing cruelty in the fact that he could forget. He had spoken of everything else.... Pidge had just left the factory and was running in her rubbers through the blur of rain toward a downtown subway entrance. A sort of mocking laughter was in her ears, “and this is New York,” the burden of it. In the dim light of the passage down into the tube she saw the gray gleaming patches of wear on the steel steps, slippery now from the rain. There was a shudder and gasp from a girl beside her; a parting of the hurrying ones ahead to avoid clotted pools of blood on two or three steps below. Farther down in the area, a man lay propped in the arms of a stranger. His face was very white. A few minutes before he had been hurrying down those steel steps that the rain had made slippery--hurrying perhaps in the same confusion of fatigue and hunger that she had known.... A pause had come to him from all that hurry. His white face was more peaceful than any of the bystanders. A hospital ambulance clanged above, as she lingered. Attendants came down with the stretcher. The body of the unconscious man was swept up by one of the swift city brooms. The stream of ticket buyers filed on as before, the downtown express crashed in. Pidge sat in her cane seat. The main crowd of the city was coming uptown at this hour. At least, she was spared that packing. She breathed the dense tired air, and recalled that on a night or two before she had slipped on the steel stairs, but had not fallen. It was borne upon her that in some way this man had fallen for her, fallen for every one who saw him or the puddles of blood he left. Every one had walked more carefully afterward, reaching for the rails. And he had lost the sense of hurry--that unmitigated madness which drove them all from dawn to dark.