Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/335

 room where he might live alone, as he had lived at college. He saw himself in a garret that was lamp-lit and peaceful, with the frost on the windows and nothing but the sloping roof between him and the stars. He would have his plays to work on—his books to read—Margaret to think of. He would have her, there, as she had been before this change in her. She could not rob him of that past, of the memory of her and the old ideal; he could live with that, as he had been living. It was enough. It was the better part. He was alone in the world; they were all strangers to him; he would escape them and be happy.

He did not call on Margaret in the morning. He wrote his letter to his uncle, and went out to look for a room. And he found one in an old red-brick house that had been built in the days when this part of the city was Greenwich village.

The landlady, who was the wife of a police sergeant, lived on the first floor and rented the rest of her house. The back room on the top story had the sloping roof and the dormer window for which Don had been longing; it had also a little iron bed with a mattress that was still dented from the weight of its former occupants, and a "Franklin" grate-stove that had warmed a long procession of young art students, writers and poor Bohemians through the first bitter winters of their struggles in New York. "There never was a finer stove to broil a chop into," the woman said, "er a slice o' toast. An' yuh can get a good meal any time aroun' the corner to the rest'runt."

She asked four dollars a week rent, but when she