For a moment, startled out of a confused succession of restless dreams, Inga could not realize where she was. Then the squalor of the room, the haggard, tortured face of Dangerfield looking down in remorse, the memory of the long night of struggle came back in a flash. She sprang up hastily.

“I went off to sleep—heavens, how late is it?”

“It’s after three—I’ve been waiting for you,” he said, in a low voice.

“Oh, why didn’t you call me?” she said hastily, struck by the new note of pain and contrition.

He brushed her question aside, staring at her.

“How was it possible—Good God, how could I have brought you here?” He stopped, shuddered, and glanced around at the room.

“You didn’t. I brought you,” she said quickly. “You had—had collapsed.”

“Sit down,” he said.

He drew a chair opposite her, took both her hands in his, and looked at her so long that she began to be embarrassed. Then, all at once, his lips twisted, his eyes filled with tears, and he buried his head in his hands.

“Don’t mind me, Mr. Dan!” she cried in her distress, bending over him. “Don’t think of me!” And, as he continued to dig his hands into his cheeks against the long pent-up emotion, she added: “I’m only happy to have helped you. Really I am.”

He rose suddenly, fighting down a sob, overcome by remorse.

“Good God, where have I dragged you?”

She came to him swiftly and seized his hands with an imperious gesture.

“What do you think I care about that?” she said, with such anger that it shocked him into attention. “To make a man out of you, I’d go through anything—anything, do you hear!”

He searched in his pockets at a sudden remembrance, found the bottle he had bought at the druggist’s the night before, and looked up at her.

“Then why didn’t you take this?” he said curtly.

“What good would that have done?” she said impatiently.

He stared at her a moment and, with a gesture of contempt, flung the bottle against the floor, where it crashed to pieces.

She swayed with a cry of joy and clung to him, her head pressed against his shoulder, as though a sea of perils had returned him safely.

“Why the devil should you care what happens to an old derelict, you queer little creature?” he said slowly, surprised at the trembling in her body.

“Care! Why, if anything had happened—” She broke off, caught her breath just at the moment when she could no longer control herself, and dug her nails into the palms of her hands in an effort to regain her self-control.

“Don’t move—stay where you are—near me,” he said gently, and he drew one arm about her shoulder.

Through the leaden, racking burdens of the night, a flood of cleansing light entered his soul, a passionate thirst for life once more. The world outside was good, full of vibrant, joyful sounds—children’s voices, laughing as they danced to the music of a hurdy-gurdy, the long chatter of scolding sparrows, tiny sounds and yet teeming with life, its curiosity, its health, its response to sensations, pleasant, intense, and intoxicating. The arm he had drawn about her tightened as though clinging to its salvage in the storm of his mind. Warned by some subtle intuition of the heart, she did not attempt to move away. Instead, one hand crept up until it lay against the rough cheek.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Dan,” she said, in a whisper. “Why, you never could have harmed any one—I know it! I know it isn’t your fault—it couldn’t be!”

“No; it isn’t my fault,” he said mechanically, but his thoughts were of the outer world with its insistent call back to life, to the life which rose in him from the perfumed contact of her straight, young body, the scent of her hair, the softness of her protecting arms, and the warm notes of her whispering voice. All at once he held her from him so that he could look into her flushed face and said solemnly, sadly:

“Inga, have you the right to do this? Don’t you know it’s a grave responsibility you have taken—to force me to go on living, hating everything, hoping nothing—for that’s what you’re doing?”

“You must—you must!” she said tremulously.

His eyes were on her every expression now, and in them was a longing to question and to be answered.

“Why did you come to me—why do you stick to me now?” he said eagerly.

“It’s just so,” she said nervously. “I can’t help it. I couldn’t have let you go out alone—Why, if you saw a child drowning you’d have to save it, wouldn’t you?” He nodded gravely. “Well, that’s the way with me. I just couldn’t be otherwise.”

“I have taken heavily from you,” he said slowly, “long, long, racking hours, and you’ve never complained. You have given me so much and I have had no right.”

She smiled.

“Those were the happiest moments.”

“And after all that,” he said, “you still want to go on—giving to me?”

Her hands came together eagerly as she raised her eyes in supplication.

“Please—oh, you wouldn’t take this from me now!”

“You don’t know, child; you don’t know what you are undertaking,” he said bitterly.

“I want it!”

“And you do all this because——”

“I believe in you.”

He turned away, not quite satisfied, and yet the feeling of what he had contemplated the day before was so coldly insistent that the revulsion urged him to cling to what she offered.

“It’s too much to ask,” he said, hesitating.

“You say that because you do not understand!” she cried, coming to him eagerly, her hand on his shoulder, standing behind him. “You don’t know all it means in my life to have the feeling of really counting.” She stopped as he turned, wondering if, at last, she was going to speak of herself. She wavered and then continued resolutely, “It’s all so useless—being alone—so starved! If you knew what it meant to me, to count, to give to some one, to fight for something, you wouldn’t talk of its being hard on me.”

He looked at her and wondered. He had known women like her before, women of the Northlands and the Old World who never complained, whose joy lay in sacrifice and redeeming. He thought of Pepita, the little Spanish model whose adoration he had not suspected until too late, and, thinking of Pepita, he wondered about Inga. What was the true feeling in her—as much as he would ever understand her? Did the girl love him? He wanted to believe it so keenly, in the weak reaction from the dread decision of the night, longing for something to cling to, that he hesitated, afraid to dissipate a fragile illusion by too brusque a question. Yet, if she did love him? At the very possibility, a new belief in himself awoke, bringing to him that sensation of life at its fullest in the power of inspiring love.

She saw the thronging, tumultuous thoughts which came crowding to his eyes, and nervously turned away. Her retreat frightened him, as such trivial symptoms can instill terror in moments of intense hope. He put his hands over his eyes to repress the too frank questioning in them, and walked to the window to regain his calm.

When he came back to her, determined to discuss matters rationally, he was conscious only of a longing to believe in her, to go forth into life and the sun once more. Yet he strove to be honest.

“This is all very well for now,” he said hurriedly, hardly trusting his voice, “but after—when we are calm, when we can see things as they are, when I face what is ahead, when you realize what you have bound your life to—a derelict—”

“And if I can make you what you were before,” she said, in simple faith.

“You can’t—men like me don’t come back,” he said bitterly, sinking into a chair. “It isn’t simply to live—that’s what you must understand. It’s—it’s to have the power to do what I used to do, and to do that, one must believe in oneself; only that is so hard—once you’ve lost it!”

“That is what I want, Mr. Dan,” she said impulsively. “I feel what there is in you. It comes to me just by your being in the room. I felt it that first night, even before you opened your eyes. I couldn’t help myself. I had to come to you to do what you wanted, to serve you. Do you think I’d have done that if you weren’t something big, something really worth while?”

He looked at her, only too impatient to be convinced, forgetting all his mental whys and wherefores in the instincts toward faith and joy which came to him in the spell of her intimacy.

“I wanted to end it,” he said wistfully, yet already the thing was far away, incredible. “I’d made up my mind.”

“Won’t you let me try?” she cried passionately. “Mr. Dan, let me try—it would be such a big—big thing in my life!”

“Try,” he said impulsively, with a glad leap of his senses, and, even at this moment, it struck him how incongruous, in this sordid interior, was this sudden release toward the beauty and the faith of things.

“And now,” she said hurriedly, “let’s get out of here—out of this awful place!”

He sprang up hastily, cursing himself for his obtuseness, and came face to face with the worn image of himself in the murky mirror. A sudden loathing seized him.

“Good Lord, do I look like that?” he cried.

“Come,” she said smilingly. She stood in the doorway, her hand on the knob, opening the way to him until he came and stood beside her, looking back in revulsion at the tawdry room. “That’s the past—we’ll shut it out forever,” she said softly, and closed the door. “Now give me your hand.”

The hallway was dark. She took his hand and guided him through the musty, oppressive darkness down the creaking, uncertain stairs, never releasing her hold until she had found the door and led him, dazzled, into the mellowness of the day.

The lights were coming out on the avenue one by one when they returned to the Arcade. He stopped, suddenly solicitous of her, on the point of suggesting that she might prefer not to be seen returning thus. But, when this return of the worldly instinct was phrasing a question, she deliberately slipped her arm through his in a closer intimacy. He laughed contentedly.

“Why do you laugh?” she said, waving her hand to Myrtle Popper, who was on guard at Joey Shine’s window.

“It was an honest laugh,” he said evasively.

The naturalness and the directness of her nature, the simple force of her emotions, unfettered by self-consciousness, in contrast with the worldliness in which he had moved, overcame him, as the clear breath of the open fields sometimes is too overpowering to those who seek it in city weariness.

And so, arm in arm, defiant of the world, they returned to the Arcade where, only a few hours before, he had come in despair and surrender, seeing the end of all things. For a moment, the whole pack of cringing doubts—of himself, of her, of the waking realism of the morrow, of distrust for the enduring quality of dramatic moments—doubts that often caused him to laugh aloud in bitterness, came howling around him. Were the tingling sensations of awaking curiosity, the delight in singing sounds and thronging life, the overwhelming passion to be, to know himself still alive, but the mirage of a fool’s paradise? She felt the inner trouble in him, and drew her arm closer to his, saying, with already a beginning of proprietorship:

“What are you mumbling to yourself like that?”

“Call it a prayer,” he said, half in earnest, half in jest.