Mrs. Maitland found her daughter but silent company the rest of that evening, and at a comparatively early hour the Maitland apartment grew dark. In Mrs. Maitland's room all was quiet, and in due course, presumably, sleep; but Helen found that slumber was alien to her eyes. So, opening her window to the little breeze that came hinting of summer although speaking of spring, she looked out wide-eyed into the starry night. It was warm, even for the time of year, and the cool breath of the ocean which Boston knows so well was not in the air. Instead the breeze moved slowly in from the westward, bringing the imagined odor of apple blossoms from unseen orchards. The city's sounds were dying to a mere rumor of sound. Now and again a light went out suddenly in some window of a near-by building; the reflection of the street lamps on the night became more and more clear. For a long time Helen gazed out into the darkness. Across the water to the northward shone the lights on the Cambridge shore. Seeing them her memory went back to the time when first she had really seen New York by night. Smith had volunteered to show her the night city as it should be seen, and never was she to free her imagination from the sight. They had gone first to the South Ferry, in the gathering dusk, and taking boat for Brooklyn had witnessed from its rear deck the golden pageant of the thousand lighted buildings of the lower city--had watched them gleam in a thousand ripples across the dark river, ripples that lay and moved like silver and golden serpents along the water. Back presently they had turned, approaching once more the stately towers that touched the sky, and this time they had sought a new angle. Over to the Jersey shore their blunt-nosed ferryboat had taken them, and thence north along the river to Twenty-third Street, seeing the gold and velvet-black city slide southward as in a dream. On all this Helen was now indefinitely reflecting, and of the man with whom she had seen it first she perhaps thought a little. But those were oblique thoughts, and hardly worth the name. All the experiences and impressions of the day--Isabel's departure from home, the wedding, the grave face of the old minister, the silence of the dim room in the parsonage, Charlie's subsequent comments, the dinner _a trois_--all these mingled in her mind, and somehow seemed a part of the great night into which she gazed. Yet there was an undercurrent of vague dissatisfaction in her reflections. All these things were true and vital, and she had been only a spectator, a visitor at the fair. Life had surged around her, but had touched her not at all, or lightly at best. Unconsciously her thoughts toward the sleeping city were as though she offered herself to it and to the life that bound it and swept through its veins. Presently, across the water, a clock began to strike the hour--midnight--and softened by the distance, the chimes came gently across the intervening space.