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They had coffee, and then they strolled about in the moonlight, while the young man smoked a very long cigar.

He looked at his watch, and sighed. “Well, Miss,” he said, “if we’re to get you safe home to your mother!”

“I won’t be a minute,” she said.

“You know the way?”

She ran upstairs, and, having put on her hat, decided that it looked cheap and vulgar, and took it off again.

He wrapped her in a soft white polo-coat for the long run to New York. She looked back at the lights of his house. Would she ever see them again, or smell the salt and the box and the roses?

By the time they had reached the Zoological Gardens at Fordham she had fallen blissfully asleep. He ran the car with considerate slowness, and looked at her very often. She waked as they crossed the river. Her eyes shrank from the piled serried buildings of Manhattan. The air was no longer clean and delicious to the lungs.

“Have I been asleep?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” she cried, “how could I! How could I! I’ve missed some of it. And it never happened before, and it will never happen again.”

“Not in the same way, perhaps,” he said gravely. “But how do you know? I think you are one girl in ten million, and to you all things are possible.”

“How many men in ten million are like you?” she asked.

“Men are all pretty much alike,” he said. “They have good impulses and bad.”

In the stark darkness between the outer and the inner door of the tenement in which she lived, there was an awkward, troubled silence. He wished very much to kiss her, but had made up his mind that he would not. She thought that he might, and had made up her mind that if he attempted to she would resist. She was not in the least afraid of him any more, but of herself.

He kissed her, and she did not resist.

“Good-night,” he said, and then with a half-laugh, “Which is your bell?”

She found it and rang it. Presently there was a rusty click, and the inner door opened an inch or so. Neither of them spoke for a full minute. Then she, her face aflame in the darkness:

“When you came I was only a little fool who’d bought a pair of shoes that were too tight for her. I didn’t know anything. I’m wise now. I know that I’m dreaming, and that if I wake up before the dream is ended I shall die.”

She tried to laugh gayly and could not.

“I’ve made things harder for you instead of easier,” he said. “I’m terribly sorry. I meant well.”

“Oh, it isn’t that,” she said. “Thank you a thousand thousand times. And good-night.”

“Wait,” he said. “Will you play with me again some time? How about Saturday?”

“No,” she said. “It wouldn’t be fair–to me. Good-night.”

She passed through the inner door and up the narrow creaking stair to the dark tenement in which she lived; she could hear the restless breathing of her sleeping family.

“Oh, my God!” she thought, “if it weren’t for them!”

As for the young man, having lighted a long cigar, he entered his car and drove off, muttering to himself:

“Damnation! Why does a girl like that have a family!”

He never saw her again, nor was he ever haunted by the thought that he had perhaps spoiled her whole life as thoroughly as if he had taken advantage of her ignorance and her innocence.