“Read that,” said Ives, handing over the slip that had been wrapped around the square of candy,

Honoria’s cheeks turned pink.

“Honoria!” cried Ives, starting up from his chair.

“Miss Clinton,” corrected Honoria, rising like Venus from the bead on the surf. “I warned you not to speak that name again.

“Honoria,” repeated Ives, “you must hear me. I know I do not deserve your forgiveness, but I must have it. There is a madness that possesses one sometimes for which his better nature is not responsible. I throw everything else but you to the winds. I strike off the chains that have bound me. I renounce the siren that lured me from you. Let the bought verse of that street pedlar plead for me. It is you only whom I can love. Let your love forgive, and I swear to you that mine will be true ‘as long as skies above are blue.”’

On the west side, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, an alley cuts the block in the middle. It perishes in a little court in the centre of the block. The district is theatrical; the inhabitants the bubbling froth of half a dozen nations. The atmosphere is Bohemian, the language polyglot, the locality precarious.

In the court at the rear of the alley lived the candy man. At seven o’clock he pushed his cart into the narrow entrance, rested it upon the irregular stone slats, and sat upon one of the handles to cool himself. There was a great draught of cool wind through the alley.

There was a window above the spot where he always stopped his push-cart. In the cool of the afternoon Mlle. Adèle, drawing card of the Aerial Roof Garden, sat at the window and took the air. Generally her ponderous mass of dark, auburn hair was down, that the breeze might have the felicity of aiding Sidonie, the maid, in drying and airing it. About her shoulders—the point of her that the photographers always made the most of—was loosely draped a heliotrope scarf. Her arms to the elbow were bare—there were no sculptors there to rave over them—but even the stolid bricks in the walls of the alley should not have been so insensate as to disapprove. While she sat thus Félice, another maid, anointed and bathed the small feet that twinkled and so charmed the nightly Aerial audiences.

Gradually Mademoiselle began to notice the candy man stopping to mop his brow and cool himself beneath her window. In the hands of her maids she was deprived for the time of her vocation—the charming and binding chariot of man. To lose time was displeasing to Mademoiselle. Here was the candy man—no fit game for her darts, truly—but of the sex upon which she had been born to make war.

After casting upon him looks of unseeing coldness for a dozen times, one afternoon she suddenly thawed, and poured down upon him a smile that put to shame the sweets upon his cart.

“Candy man,” she said, cooingly, while Sidonie followed her impulsive dive, brushing the heavy, auburn hair, “don’t you think I am beautiful?”

The candy man laughed harshly, and looked up, with his thin jaw set, while he wiped his forehead with a red-and-blue handkerchief.

“Yer’d make a dandy magazine cover,” he said grudgingly. “Beautiful or not is for them that cares. It’s not my line. If yer lookin’ for bouquets apply elsewhere between nine and twelve. I think we’ll have rain.”

Truly, fascinating a candy man is like killing rabbits in a deep snow; but the hunter’s blood is widely diffused. Mademoiselle tugged a great coil of hair from Sidonie’s hands and let it fall out the window.