The cars were still whirring up and down Stoney Island Avenue when Sommers left the cottage, but he did not think to stop one. Instead, he walked on heedlessly, mechanically, toward the city. Frequently he stumbled and with difficulty saved himself from falling over the dislocated planks of the wooden walk. The June night was brilliant above with countless points of light. A gentle wind drew in shore from the lake, stirring the tall rushes in the adjacent swamps. Occasionally a bicyclist sped by, the light from his lantern wagging like a crazy firefly. The night was strangely still; the clamorous railroads were asleep. Far away to the south a solitary engine snorted at intervals, indicating the effort of some untrained hand to move the perishing freight. Chicago was a helpless giant to-night. When he came to the region of saloons, which were crowded with strikers, he turned away from the noise and the stench of bad beer, and struck into a grass-grown street in the direction of the lake. There he walked on, unmindful of time or destination, in the marvellous state of conscious dream. The little space of one day separated him from that final meeting with Miss Hitchcock in the pleasant cottage above the lake. He had gone there, drawn by her, and he had gone away repelled, at strife with himself, with her. Nothing had happened since, and yet everything. As he had said to another woman, Mrs. Preston was a woman you remembered. And he had said that of a woman very different from the one he had seen and spoken with this night. That stricken, depressed creature of the night of the operation had faded away, and in her place was this passionate, large-hearted woman, who had spoken to him bravely as an equal in the dark room of the forbidding cottage. She had thrown a spell into his life this night, and his steps were wandering on, purposeless, unconscious, with an exhilaration akin to some subtle opiate. Her life was set in noisome places. Yet the poor mass of clay in the upper room that had burdened her so grievously--what was it, after all, but one of the ephemeral unrealities of life to be brushed aside? Decay, defeat, falling and groaning; disease, blind doctoring of disease; hunger and sorrow and sordid misery; the grime of living here in Chicago in the sharp discords of this nineteenth century; the brutal rich, the brutalized poor; the stupid good, the pedantic, the foolish,--all, all that made the waking world of his experience! It was like the smoke wreath above the lamping torch of the blast-furnace. It was the screen upon which glowed the rosy colors of the essential fire. The fire,--that was the one great thing,--the fire was life itself.