choly air. He watched her coming; the light she carried lent to her face something long gone by daylight; she was lamentably thin and haggard; in a few years she would be grotesque, but youth still lingered with her now.
He took the candle from her with a word of thanks, but he could not turn away from her pitiable eagerness.
"I suppose this sort of thing's a serious inconvenience to some people," he observed.
"Well," she answered, with a nervous little giggle, "it is to me, I must say. I know I'm not supposed to, but just the same, I do cook my dinners in my room. And now I guess I'll have to wait."
"Too bad!" he said. And still he hadn't the heart to go, even to discourage her. "Poor little devil!" he thought. "Famished for talk." And aloud he said—"Won't you come in and sit down until the lights are on again?"
Her hollow cheeks grew scarlet.
"Well . . . I don't think I'd better . . ." she said. "I'd like to, only . . ."
He didn't press the point; if necessary he could stand in the door-way until the candle burnt out in his hand, anything rather than drive away this poor creature.
"It's queer, isn't it?" she said. "A big house, all full of people, and nobody ever talking to anybody else. . . . And if you do try to be friendly, why . . . they think you're after something."
"I suppose they do," he said, thoughtfully.
"There was a woman up on this floor last year," she went on. "She looked so kind of miserable that one night when I'd fixed up a nice little supper, I knocked at her door and asked her to come in and eat with me. But she was so disagreeable about it, you'd have thought I was offering her poison. And then a little later she turned on the gas. It didn't kill her. They took her off to the hospital, and I saw in the paper that she said she'd done it because she was so lonely. . . . That's why they haven't any gas now. I guess a lot of people are lonely, like that. . . . Only, if they'd be more friendly, and not so suspicious about people, they wouldn't need to be."
"Oh, you poor little devil!" he thought, so moved that he could not speak.
