offices down-town, clerks, bookkeepers, what not--some of them
probably graduates of Frincke's Business College.

Then, as she recalled that dark portal, with its dusty stairway
mounting between close walls to disappear in the upper shadows,
her mind drew back as from a doorway to Purgatory. Nevertheless,
it was a picture often in her reverie; and sometimes it came
suddenly, without sequence, into the midst of her other thoughts,
as if it leaped up among them from a lower darkness; and when it
arrived it wanted to stay. So a traveller, still roaming the
world afar, sometimes broods without apparent reason upon his
family burial lot: "I wonder if I shall end there."

The foreboding passed abruptly, with a jerk of her breath, as the
street-lamp revealed a tall and easy figure approaching from the
north, swinging a stick in time to its stride. She had given
Russell up--and he came.

"What luck for me!" he exclaimed. "To find you alone!"

Alice gave him her hand for an instant, not otherwise moving.
"I'm glad it happened so," she said. "Let's stay out here, shall
we? Do you think it's too provincial to sit on a girl's front
steps with her?"

"'Provincial?' Why, it's the very best of our institutions," he
returned, taking his place beside her. "At least, I think so
to-night."

"Thanks! Is that practice for other nights somewhere else?"