And poor, very poor. Poorer than she had ever been in her life. Perhaps he was suffering the pangs of hunger while he walked at her side shivering in his thin, shabby jacket. "How would it be, Mr. Redlich, provided your business permits you to, if you were to come to dinner to-morrow?" His business, as a matter of fact, made it practically impossible for him to get off in the middle of the day, and he hadn't a moment's time for changing his clothes; but if she would receive him in the suit he was wearing-- "Oh of course," she laughed. "I'll even serve you with your mother's potato soup." With that she pressed both his hands and slipped into a street car. Oh, what a piece of good fortune! Now she had the thing she had so long been seeking. Some one whom she could care for and pet and spoil; some one to whom she meant more than a toy or a show piece, who needed her as he needed bread and air, who languished for a gentle hand to lead him back to hope and joy. Some one all to herself, all to herself! Out of the grave of her youth he had risen exactly as she had dreamed in her dreams. Life would again become rich--and happy--and full of secrets, tiny, gay, absolutely innocent secrets. That night she slept little, wakeful as a child the night before Christmas. The next morning, to the vast astonishment of the maid, a buxom wench from the country, who had rapidly fallen into city ways, Lilly rose early--the maid knew her to be a bit lazy--and went off to market. "A friend is coming to dinner," Lilly laughingly explained. She had to buy everything herself, the meat, the radishes, and above all the sausage that had once been the pride of his mother's potato soup. She even attended to the cooking herself. She set the table and removed the palm from beside the aquarium to have something green in the dining-room in place of flowers, which she had forgotten to buy. He was the first dinner guest she had had for two and a half years, and such a dear one--the dearest, perhaps that life could present her with. At half past twelve the maid, turning up her nose, announced a young fellow who insisted upon speaking to the lady. "Why, that's he!" cried Lilly. "He doesn't look it," observed the maid with a haughty upward inflection in her voice. Shrugging her shoulders she dawdled behind her mistress, who ran to meet the guest. At first he shyly hesitated to step into the lighter part of the room, and hugged the door post and pulled at his suit, which really looked dreadfully frayed, even more so than the night before. His inflamed eyes, two red rifts, blinking behind his round glasses, gave him a sheepish, groping, helpless appearance. The bold thinker's forehead had acquired an unpleasant backward slope because the genius lock no longer fell over it. And the triumphant blond mane had turned into a strawy, matted mass, apparently untouched by a comb this many a day. He was unable to say much.