In his dilemma Durkin dropped breathlessly down an area stairs, feeling the limp weight of the woman on his body as he fell. To Frances herself it seemed like the effortless fall in a nightmare; she could remember neither how nor when it ended, only she had the sensation of being pulled sharply across cold flagstones. Durkin had dragged her in under the shadow of the heavy brownstone steps, behind a galvanized iron garbage can, hoping against hope that he had not been noticed, and silently praying that if indeed the end was to come it might not come in a setting so sordid and mean and small. A street cat, lean and gaunt and hungry-looking, slunk like a shadow down the area-steps. The eyes of the two fugitives watched it intently. As it slunk and crept from shadow to shadow it suddenly became, to the worn and depressed Durkin, a symbol of his own career, a homeless and migratory Hunger, outlawed, pursued, unresting, a ravenous and unappeased purloiner of a great city’s scraps and tatters. The soft pressure of Frank’s arm on his own drove the passing thought from his mind. And they sat together on the stone slabs, silently, hand in hand, till the patrol-wagon rattled past once more, and the street noises died down, and hastily opened windows were closed, and footsteps no longer passed along the street above them. Then they ventured cautiously out, and, waiting their chance, sauntered decorously toward the corner. There they boarded a passing car, bound southward and crowded to the doors with the members of a German musical club, who sang loudly and boisterously as they went. It seemed the most celestial of music to Durkin, as he hung on a strap in their midst, with Frank’s warm body hemmed in close to him, and the precious weight of it clinging and swaying there from his arm. Suddenly he looked down at her. “Where are you going tonight?” he asked. Their eyes met. The tide of abandonment that had threatened to engulf him slowly subsided, as he read the quiet pain in her gaze. “I am going back to the Ralston,” she said, with resolute simplicity. “But, good heaven, think of the risk!” he still half-heartedly pleaded. “It’s dangerous, now!” “My beloved own,” she said, with her habitual slow little head shake, and with a quietness of tone that carried a tacit reproof with it, “life has far worse dangers than the Ralston!” She had felt unconditionally, completely drawn toward him a moment before, while still warm with her unuttered gratitude. As she thought of the indignity and the danger from which he had carried her she had almost burned with the passion for some fit compensation, without any consideration of self. Now, in her weariness of body and nerve, he had unconsciously unmasked her own potential weakness to herself, and she felt repelled from him, besieged and menaced by him, the kindest and yet the most cruel of all her enemies. CHAPTER XX