a remnant of linoleum. Against one wall was a narrow staircase.

It was the breakfast things that Nellie had been helping to wash up. The
little American clock on the sideboard indicated quarter past nine.

Nellie went to the front door, opened it, and stood looking out. The view
was a limited one, a short narrow side street, blinded at one end by a
high bare stone wall, bounded at the other by the almost as narrow
by-thoroughfare this side street branched from. The houses in the
thoroughfare were three-storied, and a number wore used as shops of the
huckstering variety, mainly by Chinese. The houses in the side street
were two-storied, dingy, jammed tightly together, each one exactly like
the next. The pavement was of stone, the roadway of some composite, hard
as iron; roadway and pavement were overrun with children. At the corner
by a dead wall was a lamp-post. Nearly opposite Nellie a group of excited
women were standing in an open doorway. They talked loudly, two or three
at a time, addressing each other indiscriminately. The children screamed
and swore, quarrelled and played and fought, while a shrill-voiced mother
occasionally took a hand in the diversion of the moment, usually to scold
or cull some luckless offender. The sunshine radiated that sickly heat
which precedes rain.

Nellie stood there and waited for Ned. She was 20 or so, tall and slender
but well-formed, every curve of her figure giving promise of more
luxurious development. She was dressed in a severely plain dress of black
stuff, above which a faint line of white collar could be seen clasping
the round throat. Her ears had been bored, but she wore no earrings. Her
brown hair was drawn away from her forehead and bound in a heavy braid on
the back of her neck. But it was her face that attracted one, a pale sad
face that was stamped on every feature with the impress of a determined