Miss Schump rose, rather high of head, the moment hers.

Miss Kinealy stretched her hand out into the center of the closing-in circle of heads.

"I said palm-reading, Arch, not hand-holding. Leave that part to Ed and Gert over there. Now quit squeezing--"

Mr. Sensenbrenner bent low, almost nose to her palm.

"I see," he began, his voice widening to a drawl--"I se-e a fellow about my size and complexion entering your life--"

To Miss Schump, her hand on Miss Kinealy's shoulder and her head peering over, the voice seemed to trail off somewhere out into infinitudes of space, off into bogs of eternity, away and behind some beyond.

"Gee! it's hot in here!" she muttered, no one heeding or hearing. "Sure hot. Whew!"

"Going on a long journey, and a fellow about my size and complexion is going along with you, and there's money coming--"

"Sure hot!" It was then Miss Schump, with fear of a rather growing and sickening sense of dizziness and of the wavy and unstable outline of things, slipped quietly and unobtrusively out into the hallway, her craving for air not to be gainsaid. The door to the little bedroom stood open, her pink scarf uppermost on the cot-edge. She stood for an instant in the doorway, regarding and wanting it, but quite as suddenly turned, and down the three flights gained the dewy quiet of out-of-doors, fighting muzziness.

The street had long since fallen tranquil, the Greek church casting immense shadow. The air had immediate and sedative effect upon Miss Schump's rather distressing symptoms of unrest, but not quite allaying a certain state of mental upheaval. She had the distinct sensation of the top of her head lifted off from the eyebrows up. Her state of light-headedness took voice.

"Gimme," she said, lifting the pink-mull, ankle-length skirt as if it trailed a train and marching off down-street; "now you gimme!"

An entirely new lack of self-consciousness enhanced her state of giddiness. A titter seemed to run just a scratch beneath the surface of her.

The passing figure of a woman in a black cape and a bulge of bundle elicited a burst of laughter which her hand clapped to her mouth promptly subdued. Awaiting the passing of a street-car, she was again prone to easy laughter.

"Oh, you!" she said, quirking an eye to the motorman, who quirked back.

Crossing the street, she came down rather splashily in a pool of water, wetting and staining the light slippers.

"Aw!" she repeated, scolding and stamping down at them. "Aw! Aw! You!"

Across from the gloomy pile of old Jefferson Market, she stood, reading up at an illuminated tower-clock, softly, her lips moving.

"Nine--ten--e-lev-hun--"

A dark figure slowed behind her elbow; she turned with a sense of that nearness and peered up under the lowering brim of a soft-felt hat.

"Hoddado?"

"Hello!" she answered, slyly.

"Hello!"

She peered closer.

"Got a girl?"

"Nope."

"Blow suds?"

"Where?"

"Cora's."

He flung back his coat, revealing a star.

"You're under arrest," he said, laconically. "Solicitin'. Come on; no fuss."

Her comprehension was unplumbed.

"O Lord!" she said, pressing inward at her waistline to abet laughter, following him voluntarily enough, and her voice rising. "You make me laugh. You make me laugh."

"That'll do," he said.

"Whoop la-la!"

"Now, you get noisy and watch me."

He turned in rather abruptly at a side door of the dark-red pile of building which boasted the illuminated tower-clock and a jutting ell with barred windows.

She drew back.

"No, you don't! Aw, no, you don't! Whatta you think I yam? Cora's! Tell it to the poodles and the great Danes!"

He shoved her with scant ceremony beyond the heavy door. She entered in one of the uncontrollable gales of laughter, the indoor heat immediately inducing the dizziness.

"Whatta you think I yam? Tell it to the poodles and the great Danes!"

Thirty minutes later, in a court-room as smeared of atmosphere as a dirty window, a bridge officer, reading from a slip of paper, singsonged to the sergeant-at-arms:

"Stella Schump. Officer Charles Costello."

How much more daringly than my poor pen would venture, did life, all of a backhanded, flying leap of who knows what centrifugal force, transcend for Stella Schump the vague boundaries of the probable.

The milky-fleshed, not highly sensitized, pinkly clean creature of an innocence born mostly of ignorance and slow perceptions, who that morning had risen sweet from eleven hours of unrestless sleep beside a mother whose bed she had never missed to share, suddenly here in slatternliness! A draggled night bird caught in the aviary of night court, lips a deep vermilion scar of rouge, hair out of scallop and dragging at the pins, the too ready laugh dashing itself against what must be owned a hiccough.

Something congenital and sleeping subcutaneously beneath the surface of her had scratched through. She was herself, strangely italicized.

A judge regarded her not unkindly. There were two of him, she would keep thinking, one merging slightly into his prototype.

She stood, gazing up. Around her swam the court-room--rows of faces; comings and goings within her railed area. And heat--the dizzying, the exciting heat--and the desire to shake off the some one at her elbow.

That some one was up before her now, in a chair beside the judge, and his voice was as far away as Archie Sensenbrenner's.

"And she says to me, she says, your Honor, 'Got a girl?'"

"Were those her exact words to you?"

"Yes, your Honor."