The city rippled into light. It bloomed, blossom on blossom, like some enchanted jungle under the heavy summer sky. Dickie sat on a bench in Washington Square. He sat forward, his hands hanging between his knees, his lips parted, and he watched the night. It seemed to him that it was filled with the clamor of iron-throated beasts running to and fro after their prey. The heat was a humid, solid, breathless weight—a heat unknown to Millings. Dickie wore his threadbare blue serge suit. It felt like a garment of lead.

There were other people on the benches—limp and sodden outlines. Dickie had glanced at them and had glanced away. He did not want to think that he looked like one of these—half-crushed insects,—bruised into immobility. A bus swept round the corner and moved with a sort of topheavy, tipsy dignity under the white arch. It was loaded with humanity, its top black with heads. "It ain't a crowd," thought Dickie; "it's a swarm." His eyes followed the ragged sky-line. "Why is it so horrible?" he asked himself—"horrible and beautiful and sort of poisonous—it plumb scares a fellow—" A diminished moon, battered and dim like a trodden silver coin, stood up above him. By tilting his head he could look directly at it through an opening in the dusty, electric-brightened boughs. The stars were pin-pricks here and there in the dense sky. The city flaunted its easy splendor triumphantly before their pallid insignificance. Tarnished purities, forgotten ecstasies, burned-out inspirations—so the city shouted raucously to its faded firmament.

Dickie's fingers slid into his pocket. The moon had reminded him of his one remaining dime. He might have bought a night's lodging with it, but after one experience of such lodgings he preferred his present quarters. In Dickie's mind there was no association of shame or ignominy with a night spent under the sky. But fear and ignominy tainted and clung to his memory of that other night. He had saved his dime deliberately, going hungry rather than admit to himself that he was absolutely at the end of his resources. To-morrow he would not especially need that dime. He had a job. He would begin to draw pay. In his own phrasing he would "buy him a square meal and rent him a room somewhere." Upon these two prospects his brain fastened with a leech-like persistency. And yet above anything he had faced in his life he dreaded the job and the room. The inspiration of his flight, the impulse that had sped him out of Millings like a fire-tipped arrow, that determination to find Sheila, to rehabilitate himself in her esteem, to serve her, to make a fresh start, had fallen from him like a dead flame. The arrow-flight was spent. He had not found Sheila. He had no way of finding her. She was not at her old address. Her father's friend, the Mr. Hazeldean that had brought Sylvester to Marcus's studio, knew nothing of her. Mrs. Halligan, her former landlady, knew nothing of her. Dickie, having summoned Mrs. Halligan to her doorsill, had looked past her up the narrow, steep staircase. "Did she live away up there?" he had asked. "Yes, sorr. And 't was a climb for the poor little crayture, but there was days when she'd come down it like a burrd to meet her Pa." Dickie had faltered, white and empty-hearted, before the kindly Irishwoman who remembered so vividly Sheila's downward, winged rush of welcome. For several hours after his visit to the studio building he had wandered aimlessly about, then his hunger had bitten at him and he had begun to look for work. It was not difficult to find. A small restaurant displayed a need of waiters. Dickie applied. He had often "helped out" in that capacity, as in most others, at The Aura. He cited his experience, referred to Mr. Hazeldean, and was engaged. The pay seemed to him sufficient to maintain life. So much for that! Then he went to his bench and watched the day pant itself into the night. His loneliness was a pitiful thing; his utter lack of hope or inspiration was a terrible thing.

But as the night went slowly by, he faced this desolation with extraordinary fortitude. It was part of that curious detachment, that strange gift of impersonal observation. Dickie bore no grudges against life. His spirit had a fashion of standing away, tiptoe, on wings. It stood so now like a presence above the miserable, half-starved body that occupied the bench and suffered the sultriness of August and the pains of abstinence. Dickie's wide eyes, that watched the city and found it horrible and beautiful and frightening, were entirely empty of bitterness and of self-pity. They had a sort of wistful patience.

There came at last a cool little wind and under its ministration Dickie let fall his head on his arms and slept. He was blessed by a dream: shallow water clapping over a cobbled bed, the sharp rustle of wind-edged aspen leaves, and two stars, tender and misty, that bent close and smiled. He woke up and stared at the city. He got up and walked about. He was faint now and felt chilled, although the asphalt was still soft underfoot and smelled of hot tar. As he moved listlessly along the pavement, a girl brushed against him, looked up, and murmured to him. She was small and slight. His heart seemed to leap away from the contact and then to leap almost irresistibly to meet it. He turned away and went back quickly toward the Square. It seemed to him that he was followed. He looked over his shoulder furtively. But the girl had disappeared and there was no one in sight but a man who walked unsteadily. Dickie suddenly knew why he had saved that dime. The energy of a definite purpose came to him. He remembered a swinging door back there around a corner, but when he reached the saloon, it was closed. Dickie had a humiliating struggle with tears. He went back to his bench and sat there, trembling and swearing softly to himself. He had not the strength to look farther. He was no longer the Dickie of Millings, a creature possessed of loneliness and vacancy and wandering fancies, he was no longer Sheila's lover, he was a prey to strong desires. In truth, thought Dickie, seeking even now with his deprecatory smile for likenesses and words, the city was full of beasts, silent and stealthy and fanged. That spirit, aloof, maintained its sweet detachment. Beneath its observation Dickie fought with a grim, unreasoning panic that was very like the fear of a man pursued by wolves.