road, tugging, and they would drop their bricks here: he would lend a hand himself -a little outdoor work would make him as strong as any of them-and Hannah and Bertha could paint the fence. It was good to be home! That rainy evening in Posen when he had gone into the railway station and asked for a third class ticket to Visco-third class, not fourth, and via Warsaw at the railway station, they had had a time finding Visco. The train left at two in the morning. Standing in the doorway of the deserted station, wondering what he could do until then, watching the rain coming through the dark trees to the roadway, he thought of his native town almost with alarm, as a traveller might think of a lonely village when he suddenly realizes he must spend the night there. But here he was, standing on his own grass-and what a place it would be. It was home-and Sixth Avenue with its lights and rush overhead was far

away.

He might have stayed there. He might have had another woman-but not like Hannah. She was a woman that a man might rest on when he was tired: crude, but a woman of the earth. Sixth Avenue with its rush overhead-he would tell them stories of it. He thought of those iron girders, running in pairs all along the street: he would construct too. He would build, and build well, on his own ground. He looked about. His eyes fell on the dark lump with its curl of smoke.

"That will come down," he cried. And he pictured the new concrete cellar under way-for he had a hatred for the house, and he paced up and down proudly underneath the poplars. And through the leaves, there was the windmill still doing its silent handsprings. He opened the door, and stepped into the bad air. There was heavy breathing. He turned out the magic light.

Those two had risen, and were over next to the stove. Hannah had felt a breathing in her ear and then a voice. First she had thought it was Heinrich, and, being sleepy, had pretended not to hear, but she recognized her mother's voice. They were talking now in low whispers, mother and daughter, standing in their stocking feet.

Hannah turns away and stares out of the window. Her bouncing face is hard and sullen in the gloom-just as it was during the music. The moonlight shines on an edge of that rusty vegetable garden

that yields for all. Not only for them, but for those others who drop in-and would not drop in, perhaps, if there was nothing. A pig suddenly passes beneath the window. She starts back. It is Bertha. She is doing something out therebending down. She is looking for something. There, she is stooping down by the gate and picking up what seems to be a stick. But it is no good, and she throws it away. She looks all about. She goes out into the road and looks up and down. Her hair is all over her face.

Now she is pushing Hannah aside,

reaching for something above the stoveup on one toe again, which had so amused Heinrich. It is the red stick.

She left the door open, and now the moonlight comes in there too. It makes a narrow path across the floor and the bed, where the gray blanket is rising and falling regularly-his stomach, it should be. Bertha tiptoes forward in her wet stocking feet, Hannah following. The daughter kicks something: it is one of the yellow shoes, and it shines out in the light. Bertha is feeling for his face, and finds it-in mid-air. He is sitting up, staring at them. Probably heard it all. Well, then

Bertha is thrown on her knees with the impetus. A groan. She is raising herself up slowly to do it again- She feels on the bed

"What's this?" comes a voice from the floor. "Don't, don't-Hannah! There is more you're killing me-for only a dollar!"

It was a half hour before dawn, or so. No one at all on the road from the station. In the dark lump of a house, they lighted that strange lantern. They looked through the papers. Hannah could read a trifle. They came to the letter of credit. What's that? "It's a hotel bill," said Hannah. And this, with a photograph on it? "Heinrich Gab-rows-ky," she read aloud. Mother and daughter looked at each other. They bent over the photograph. Something far back seemed to crack in their minds. And there was the name. Hannah gave a silly laugh-a sort of whine.

W

ATCHING the swirl following its mad leader into a maze of laughing, singing, swaying, dancing couples capped in carnival fancies of gay paper, Naomi Widdowson, standing in the doorway of the Big Savage Country Club ballroom, wondered how soon she and Hamar might slip away and go home.

Out of the figure momentarily, she stood alone, laden with cotillon favors an idiotic pink ruff, a shepherdess hat of blue, a long crook, a toy balloon, magnificent crêpe roses, and grotesque chrysanthemums. Her hair was on the point of falling over her flushed face-she was one of the two or three members who held out against the fashion of shingling-and her coral gown was torn. But the slight, bald prodigy of endurance, the cotillonmaster, knew nothing of fatigue. He was determined, Naomi suspected, to make up in excess of exertion for a certain mechanical technique of frivolity.

From the side doors that opened on the wide porches of the clubhouse came two stodgy little girls carrying incredibly wide baskets from which overflowed new stocks of favors. In the centre of the room the dancers were tossing colored paper streamers over wires which crossed above their heads; they were shouting and jostling. They were hugely pleased by the impromptu revival by the negro musicians of "Rufus Rastus Johnson Brown."

At intervals Naomi saw her husband in the throng. He was having a good time; probably he would not want to go home. The music kept beating, beating, beating. The figure was without an end, apparently. With gathering dejection Naomi remembered they were driving the Starkweathers home. That, of course, settled leaving before the final beat of the drums.

The Starkweathers were the kind of people who stay until the end of everything.

Suddenly Naomi was angry. Why should she stand there covered with a professional caterer's trash? These people, excepting Hamar, were infinitely silly. Most of them were older than she; many of them had children. Regina Aldis had five; but there she was, capering in a riotous cake-walk. And there went Hamar, posturing with that Terriss girl, Georgia. Georgia Terriss, Naomi had heard around card-tables at Big Savage, made a specialty of married men.

She turned and walked slowly to a row of chairs, stripped off her favors, and tossed them in a forlorn heap. Then, without a glance behind, she walked out to the porch.

This was better. Cushioned wicker beside a white pillar, with a moonlit view across the rolling sweep of the fairways, suited her mood. Sitting there she admitted to herself that this mood had been coming on since she had bundled little Michael into the coupé and hurried him back to the orphans' home, from which he had been borrowed.

She had done right. She had satisfied herself of that; and Hamar, looking up from his coffee, had nodded.

"I don't think we ought to keep him unless you feel the need for him; and unless we could do him full justice," he had said. Hamar was like that; he had never, in all of their eleven years together, made things difficult.

The obstacle was, Naomi told herself, the sum of the never-ending, insistent exactions of children and the pressures of the set in which she and Hamar moved. At thirty-two she was being driven to the last, ultimate ounce of energy. Her experiment of two weeks with the borrowed boy, who was five years old, had prompted caution. He had required so much. Naomi saw that if she kept him she would

have to choose between things which had become very important to her and the care of the child.

Speculation about how Mrs. Aldis kept

her head above the surface of the social whirlpool and looked after her brood was not comforting. All of the Big Savage crowd wondered how she did it. If Re