looked sharply at the girl for an instant. He had heard some strange things from women in the boarding house. They certainly believed that Augusta had some insight or foresight, or something. She had told them things about themselves. But when he spoke he was blandly didactic.

"That, you know," he explained, "is just the first quiver of the shock, felt by the ganglia, the nerve knots; before the rude noise gets to the brain."

"There was a man in our town," Augusta chanted, skipping to the door, "And he was wondrous wise——"

Wardwell listened to the receding hum of her voice as it died down in the well of the stairs. Then he turned and with a vicious yank tore the offending story of Casey's picnic from the machine and ground the paper into the floor with his heel.

An hour later he was sitting on the floor with half a novel of loose sheets of paper scattered all about him. He had found the table too small for the work, had transferred his operations to the bed—he was cutting madly at page after page of the type-written stuff—but, finding that he was jabbing the pencil through the paper, he had swept the whole business to the floor and gone at it with vengeance.

He had spent eight months on the book, and it was still a formless wad of words. There was an idea in it, a live, working idea. But "The Feet of the Plodders," as he was calling the book, would neither plod nor jig. They strutted along, he complained, stiff as wooden horses, fatuous as roosters.

"You talk like a hatful of wood," he said contemptuously to Gerald Straight, his hero, who, on the paper, was giving out some pet ideas of Wardwell's own on the dignity of labor. Down came the pencil and the whole paragraph was condemned as, "Rot!"

He did not notice Augusta coming back into the room. He looked up as he grunted his disapproval of what he had thought very fine while writing it.

The girl stood in the doorway, swaying and clutching desperately at the door frame for support. She must have run madly up the stairs, for it was plain that she was breathless from physical exertion, as well as speechless from some strange, uncanny fright.

"She's gone!" she gasped, as Wardwell jumped from the floor and hurried to her. "I can almost see it! It almost seems that I did see it," she went on, fighting with herself to tell a plain story.

"The apple woman at the corner saw her fall. Her head struck on the curb. The apple woman ran to her. But she got to her feet and walked away without looking back.

"Right past her own doorway she went, without looking up—the apple woman saw her—and straight over toward Broadway.

"I ran all the way, asking, begging people to say they'd seen her. But not one would say it!"

"But," said Wardwell, "it doesn't prove anything. She was a little dazed. She didn't want to come in to frighten you. She just walked around a little and went, maybe, to a doctor. That's what she'd do, can't you see?"

"I wish I could, Jimmie. But it isn't what she'd do at all. She'd just walk quietly into the house, and I'd never know that anything had happened.

"I'm going out again! I can't stay, she may be wandering farther and farther from me every minute!"

There was a fierce, mothering eagerness in the girl's voice, as though she already saw the tragedy of the months to come, and had already taken up the burden of being mother to her mother.

Wardwell laid a gentle hand on the girl's shoulder, saying:

"I think you could better let me go. I can go farther than you."

"She went toward Broadway," the girl said slowly. "But it's no use trying to save me that way. I must find her myself. I know that."

Jimmie had already pushed past her through the door and started for the stairs. He saw that she was in such a state that unless she saw someone doing something she would herself start out again.

"Thank you," she said simply. "But I cannot promise to stay in."

"I think you must. You know we're both foolish. We don't either of us really believe that anything's happened to her. But you must stay in. She's sure to come in any minute."

Arguing her into a kind of silent promise that she would not go out and would not worry, Wardwell left the house and started east through Eighteenth Street.

In the open, quiet street, away from the urge of Augusta's excitement, Wardwell felt entirely foolish. He expected to see the strong-willed, self-reliant woman who was Augusta's mother coming along the street at any moment, and he wondered what he should say to her.

Nothing ever did happen, anyway. Rose Wilding had just walked into a drug store or a doctor's, maybe, and had had to wait. That was it, of course.

He walked toward Broadway, taking, without any conscious notion of following a trace, the direction which the old apple woman had given.

Coming out of the quiet cross street he stepped thoughtlessly into the rush of traffic that sweeps through Union Square. An automobile brushed carelessly by within inches of him. A great lumbering truck came charging down upon him. A motorcycle screamed at his ear. He leaped back to the curb, muttering at the grinning fiend in goggles who shot past.

Wardwell stood on the curb looking out over the shifting lines and tides of trucks, handcarts, automobiles, horses and people. He was looking for one person out of the hundreds and hundreds that moved within range of his eye. As well, he thought, look for a particular stone in the paving.

A few men have stepped into the wilderness and never been seen again. But how many, many men, and women, have stepped off a curb into a stream like that and never been seen again.

There's Flynn, the cop, across the street. He knows me by sight. He could say he saw me step off the curb. And that's all he could say. I could lose myself from anybody that ever saw me. The string that holds us where we are is so thin that—Why it's a wonder that anybody stays where he is! It's so easy to walk out, completely out!

And then some of Augusta's excited worry came upon him. Rose Wilding might have been stunned by the fall. She might have walked, dazed, right past her own door, right off this curb and into that sea of moving life!

"Is it kiddin' me you are?" snorted officer Flynn. "Lookin' for your boarding mistress! More like, she's lookin' for you."

"No, I'm not," said Jimmie quietly. "I'm right in earnest. Her daughter has it that she fell and struck her head on the curb, and lost—"

"Sure. There'd have to be a daughter in it."

"Oh, go to Blazes!" snapped Jimmie, turning on his heel.

"I might have known better," he growled as he walked away. "They never do anything unless you show them a corpse. And then they'd like to club you for giving them trouble."

He turned south, looking to the only other resource he knew. He was a New Yorker with all of a New Yorker's entire dependence on the two forces that govern his town—the police and the newspapers.

At Astor Place he ran across Jim Ray, a dark little crank of a man, a man who looked as old as the first thing that ever happened, and seemed to have been present at every happening since the first. He was coming from a stormy, snapping interview with an irate, bullying financier, and he was on his way to get the personal story of an interesting adventuress who had gotten herself into jail.

But he listened to Wardwell. In fact, he always listened to everything, until he was sure it was not worth listening to.

He had known Wardwell during the latter's sporadic incursions into newspaper work, and had shown a grudging, contrary sort of liking for him.

"Which do you want to go on," Ray questioned