Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/224

It happened to be the eve of the genial Saint Valentine's Day. Shop windows were gay with pleasantly exaggerated symbols of his romantic power. Winter afternoons in the city are cruel to the unfortunate, for the throng of the streets, the light and lure of the scene, make loneliness all the worse if there is trouble in your heart.

Judy sat in the waiting room of the Long Island terminal in Brooklyn, and tears were on her face. She had somehow missed Mrs. Flaherty's lad. Then she had tried to find her way to the lodging-house, but grew more and more frightened and bewildered as she strayed. Giving that up, she had gone into a movie, and there, for a while, she had been happy. The favourites of the screen are the true internationalists: they speak a language, crude though it often is, which is known from Brooklyn to Bombay. But then pictures were shown of scenes in Ireland. She came out with cold hands, and wandered vaguely along the streets until dusk. Finally, in despair, she groped back to the station at Flatbush Avenue, and sat forlornly on a bench, too weary and sorry even to ask how to get home.

With the unerring instinct of the stranger for choosing the wrong place, she had blundered into the downstairs station, by the train-gates, missing