On the way downtown as the traffic crowded, the limousine and the omnibus passed and repassed each other. It was a frostily clear forenoon with Fifth Avenue sparkling like a string of jewel beads, and sometimes Anne could see Happy's face thrust out with wonderment written large upon its features. To her it was all new: this miracle of a city of millions. Her heart was fluttering to the first sight of that tide of men and motors; that crest-pluming of wealth and undertow of misery; that gaiety and tragedy that rolls in vigour and in poison along a mighty urban artery. But Anne felt like a fragment of flotsam carried hopelessly on the current. When the limousine had turned into a side street of dignified old houses, Anne rode on, and leaving the bus made her way on foot through meaner streets where the smell of garlic hung pervasive and the gutturals of Slavic speech came from bearded and beady eyed faces. She went through the East Side's warrens of congestion and poverty, slipping through crowds of shawled and haggling women who elbowed about push-carts. Yet when she had time to retreat again to the sanctuary of her own small room, Anne felt that an element of augmented strength had come to her, as if she had caught a breath of the laurel bloom from Slag-face through the stenches and the jargons. "If I can hold out," she told herself, "if I can only hold out, I'll have my self-respect!" After a moment she added, "She will probably see him soon, but she can't tell him she saw me--because she doesn't know it." CHAPTER XLIV Uncle Billy Taulbee's store had stood for a half century in the shade of mighty sycamores, where a trickle of water glinted over pebble and shale, worn hub-deep into wheel-ruts. Except when the spring thaws carried a tawny flood up almost to the edge of his doorstep and the "tide" had right of way, that creek bed and the sandy lane angling across it constituted the junction of the Smoky Hollow Road and that debouching over to "The left hand fork of Nighway Creek." Roundabout it were streamlets with pools where, in season, the mountain trout leaped and darted in shimmering flashes, and to the store one summer noon came two hungry fishermen from the lowlands. They sat on cracker boxes, eating canned peaches and "Vienny" sausages, encouraging the keen-eyed old storekeeper to talk and plying him with questions as to what his coal royalties had run to on this tract and what on that, in the space of the past few years. With neither boast nor evasion, the old man answered them. "But, heavens above, Uncle Billy," exclaimed one of the visitors--(for every man and child called him Uncle Billy--"An' I reckon," he said, "ther houn-dawgs would too, if so be they had ther gift of speech"). "Heavens above, if you go on making money like that you'll be able to sign a check for a million dollars before you end up!"