"Well, let's go and sit down somewhere," Maurice suggested. She agreed, and there was some haphazard wandering about in the darkness, then a weary sitting on a bench in the park, marking time till Batty would surely be asleep. "You sure handed one out to him," Lily said. Maurice chuckled at the role of knight-errant which she seemed to discern in him, but he talked earnestly of her future, and once or twice, soothed by his voice, she dozed--but he didn't know it. Indeed, he told himself afterward that her silences showed how his words were sinking in! "It only goes to prove," he thought, when at midnight he left her at her own door, "that the _flower_ is in all of them! If you only go about it right, you can bring their purity to the surface! She felt all I said. Eleanor will be awfully interested in her." He was quite sure about Eleanor; he had entirely forgiven her; he wanted to wake her up, and sit on the edge of her bed, and tell her of his evening, and what a glorious thing it would be to lift one lovely young soul from the gutter. CHAPTER X But Eleanor would not "wake up." Within an hour of her foolish outbreak she had begun to listen for his returning step. Then she went to bed and cried and cried, "He doesn't love me," she said, over and over; and once she said, "it is because I am--" But she didn't finish this; she just got up and went over to the bureau and stared into the mirror; she even lit a candle and held it close to the glass; after a while she saw what she was looking for. "Edith tried to make him notice them, that first summer at Green Hill," she thought. At eleven she went to the window and watched, her eyes straining into the darkness. When, far down the street, a man's figure came in range, she held her breath until it walked into and out of the circling glare of the arc light--not Maurice! It was after twelve when she saw him coming--and instantly she flew back to her bed. When he entered the faintly lighted room, Eleanor was, apparently, sound asleep. "Star?" No answer. He leaned over, saw the droop of her lip and the puffed eyelids--and drew back. Perhaps, if he had kissed her, the soft lead pencil might not have acted as Destiny; she might have melted under the forlorn story he was so eager to tell her. But her tear-stained face did not suggest a kiss. In the morning Eleanor had what she called a "bilious headache," and when Maurice skirted the subject of the "_flower_," she was too physically miserable to be interested. When she was well again, the opportunity--if it was an opportunity!--was lost; her interest in Lily was not needed, because a call at the apartment house showed Maurice that Batty was forgiven. So he forgot his desire to lift the fallen, in more of those arid moments with Eleanor; reproaches--and reconciliations! Tears--and fire! But fires gradually die down under tears, no matter how one spends one's breath blowing loving words on the wet embers! Enough tears will put out any fire.