drawn like moths out of the darkness towards the spots of light beneath each street-lamp. A great, ugly Ukranian sat on the steps rocking gently and playing a Little Russian song on a wheezy concertina.
For a moment, while Philip stood in the shadow of the doorway, looking down the long vista of the hot, overcrowded street, he felt again the old, poignant sense of the richness, the color that was born simply out of being allowed to live. And then suddenly he became aware of a familiar presence close at hand, of a voice heard in the twilight above the clamor of children, which made him feel suddenly ill.
Before the doorway of the next house he could see the dim figure of Irene Shane, a pale gray figure which seemed at times almost a ghost. The other woman he could not see in the hard reality, but he saw with all the painful clearness of an image called up by the sound of her soft voice. It was Mary Conyngham calling on some sick baby. He listened, hiding in the shadow, while a Polish woman talked to her in broken English. Then suddenly she turned away and with Irene Shane passed so near to the doorway that he could have touched her.
She was gone, quickly, lost in the crowd. He hadn't run after her and cried out what was in his heart, because he was afraid. His whole body was shaking; and he burned with a fire that was at once agony and delight, for the thing that had happened with Naomi made this other pain the more real and terrible.
For ten minutes he sat on the step of Krylenko's boarding-house, his head in his hands. When at last he rose to climb the hill, all the sense of exhilaration had flowed away, leaving him limp and exhausted. For
