game the other night in the poppy-room. It's easy. His first wife was
death on flowers. She used to train roses over their back fence. He
loved to see her there. He wants me to like to grow them. He wants to
take me back to a home of my own and peace, where life can't look to a
girl like a devil with horns. He wants to take me home. What'll I do,
Kess? Please, please, what'll I do?"

He was rather inarticulate, but reached out to pat her arm. "Go--to
it--girl, and--God bless you!"

* * * * *

Forest Park Boulevard comes in sootily, smokestacks, gas-tanks, and
large areas of scarred vacant lots boding ill enough for its destiny.
But after a while, where Taylor Avenue bisects, it begins to retrieve
itself. Here it is parked down its center, a narrow strip set out in
shrubs, and on either side, traffic, thus divided, flows evenly up and
down a macadamized roadway. In summer the shrubs thicken, half
concealing one side of Forest Park Boulevard from its other. Houses
suddenly take on detached and architectural importance, often as not a
gravel driveway dividing lawns, and out farther still, where the street
eventually flows into Forest Park, the Italian Renaissance invades,
somebody's rococo money's worth.

I.W. Goldstone's home, so near the park that, in spring, the smell of
lilacs and gasolene hovers over it, pretends not to period or dynasty.
Well detached, and so far back from the sidewalk that interlocking trees
conceal its second-story windows, an alcove was frankly a bulge on its
red-brick exterior. Where the third-floor bath-room, an afterthought,
led off the hallway, it jutted out, a shingled protuberance on the left