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 subject. One of these days, Grover was thinking, she will break under one or the other of the two moods. To dwell upon the future in store for her was intolerable.

"Last night I had a priest," Marthe was inconsequentially telling him. "If you had only seen him cross himself!

Grover failed to join in the outburst of laughter which this anecdote, overheard by their immediate neighbors, occasioned, and Marthe shook him, as if to rouse him out of his moodiness.

"I must go to work," she remonstrated. "It's late."

He paid for the drinks and walked out with her. At the corner Marthe stopped, in embarrassment. He assumed that they had reached her regular beat and that she was tactfully taking leave of him.

Being unusually restless he was unwilling to part from her. "Come a little way with me," he pleaded, and suddenly she became docile.

They walked for a long time in silence.

"You're in the moon," she remarked discontentedly.

As a matter of fact he might well have been on another planet so little did he feel himself in contact with his kind. The man in his shoes was a stranger to him, and an indifferent one. The little figure walking forlornly at his side moved him to pity. In a sense he felt responsible for her. A doom was over her which he could certainly not prevent, but which he felt he should at least try, in some manner, to mitigate.