“Extend the time,” said Hetty. “This is a big town. Think of how many girls he might have to see soaked in water with their hair down before he would recognize you. The stew’s getting on fine—but, oh, for an onion! I’d even use a piece of garlic, if I had it.”

The beef and potatoes bubbled merrily, exhaling a mouth-watering savour that yet lacked something, leaving a hunger on the palate, a haunting, wistful desire for some lost and needful ingredient.

“I came near drowning in that awful river,” said Cecilia, shuddering.

“It ought to have more water in it,” said Hetty; “the stew, I mean. I’ll go get some at the sink.”

“It smells good,” said the artist.

“That nasty old North River?” objected Hetty. “It smells to me like soap factories and wet setter-dogs—oh, you mean the stew. Well, I wish we had an onion for it. Did he look like he had money?”

“First he looked kind,” said Cecilia. “I’m sure he was rich; but that matters so little. When he drew out his bill-folder to pay the cabman you couldn’t help seeing hundreds and thousands of dollars in it. And I looked over the cab doors and saw him leave the ferry station in a motor-car; and the chauffeur gave him his bearskin to put on, for he was sopping wet. And it was only three days ago.”

“What a fool!” said Hetty shortly.

“Oh, the chauffeur wasn’t wet,” breathed Cecilia. “And he drove the car away very nicely.”

“I mean you,” said Hetty. “For not giving him your address.”

“I never give my address to chauffeurs,” said Cecilia, haughtily.

“I wish we had one,” said Hetty, disconsolately.

“What for?”

“For the stew, of course—oh, I mean an onion.”

Hetty took a pitcher and started to the sink at the end of the hall.

A young man came down the steps from above just as she was opposite the lower step. He was decently dressed, but pale and haggard. His eyes were dull with the stress of some burden of physical or mental woe. In his hand he bore an onion—a pink, smooth, solid, shining onion, as large around as a ninety- eight-cent alarm clock.

Hetty stopped. So did the young man. There was something Joan of Arc-ish, Herculean, and Una-ish in the look and pose of the shop-lady—she had cast off the rôles of Job and Little-Red-Riding Hood. The young man stopped at the foot of the stairs and coughed distractedly. He felt marooned, held up, attacked, assailed, levied upon, sacked, assessed, panhandled, brow-beaten, though he knew not why. It was the look in Hetty’s eyes that did it. In them he saw the Jolly Roger fly to the masthead and an able seaman with a dirk between his teeth scurry up the ratlines and nail it there. But as yet he did not know that the cargo he carried was the thing that had caused him to be so nearly blown out of the water without even a parley.

“Beg your pardon,” said Hetty, as sweetly as her dilute acetic acid tones permitted, “but did you find that onion on the stairs? There was a hold in the paper bag; and I’ve just come out to look for it.”