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 to the point of tears. “The last house,” Selina promised him, “the very last one. After this one we'll go home.” She filled her basket again. “We'll have something to eat on the way, and maybe you'll go to sleep with the canvas over you, high, fastened to the seat like a tent. And we'll be home in a jiffy.”

The last house was a new gray stone one, already beginning to turn dingy from the smoke of the Illinois Central suburban trains that puffed along the lake front a block to the east. The house had large bow windows, plump and shining. There was a lawn, with statues, and a conservatory in the rear. Real lace curtains at the downstairs windows with plush hangings behind them. A high iron grille ran all about the property giving it an air of aloofness, of security. Selina glanced at this wrought-iron fence. And it seemed to bar her out. There was something forbidding about it—menacing. She was tired, that was it. The last house. She had almost five dollars, earned in the last hour. “Just five minutes,” she said to Dirk, trying to make her tone bright, her voice gay. Her arms full of vegetables which she was about to place in the basket at her feet she heard at her elbow:

“Now, then, where’s your license?”

She turned. A policeman at her side. She stared up at him. How enormously tall, she thought; and how red his face. “License?”

“Yeh, you heard me. License. Where’s your pedler’s license? You got one, I s’pose.”

“Why, no. No.” She stared at him, still.