Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/182

170 "Fine. How 're you?"

"A' right."

Carney usually relapsed into a satisfied silence as soon as they met; and she, to-night, instead of making conversation for him, looked straight before her, with an air of saying: "Go on, now. I 've helped you all I intend to. You 'll have to do this by yourself."

He looked puzzled, as if he did not know how to begin. They walked up Broadway, jostled by the crowds that poured from the shops and the office buildings. When they came to Astor Place, she turned east toward Third Avenue, as if she were going home. "Hol' on," he said. "Ain't yuh—"

"Ain't I what?"

He hitched up his neck in his tight collar. "Ain't yuh—goin' to have somethin' t' eat?"

She asked merely: "Where 'll we go?"

What 's the matter with Dinkey's?"

"All right."

And they went along again, in silence.

It was a week now since she had met Carney, one midday, as she was going out to her luncheon and he was delivering a load of goods to the freight elevator of Sturm & Bergman's. She had recognized him at once, by the scar on his upper lip, and remembered the day she had given him that wound, accidentally. (She had been breaking up a box for her mother's firing, and the head had slipped off the hatchet and struck him in the mouth.) He had been little Philly Carney then, going to school; and she had been "Clare" Walsh, carrying