The man who held it in his grasp went on carelessly, not knowing that the mere sound of his step had raised it as from the dead.
She, and her right, and her pain, were nothing to him now, she remembered, staring out at the taunting hot sky.

Yet so vacant was the sudden life opened before her when he was gone, that, in the desperation of her weakness, her mad longing to see him but once again, she would have thrown herself at his feet, and let the cold, heavy step crush her life out,--as he would have done, she thought, choking down the icy smother in her throat, if it had served his purpose, though it cost his own heart's life to do it.

He would trample her down, if she kept him back from his end; but be false to her, false to himself, that he would never be! The red bricks, the dusty desk covered with wool, the miserable chicken peering out, grew sharper and more real.

Life was no morbid nightmare now; her weak woman's heart found it near, cruel.

There was not a pain nor a want, from the dumb question in the dog's eyes that passed her on the street, to her father's hopeless fancies, that did not touch her sharply through her own loss, with a keen pity, a wild wish to help to do something to save others with this poor life left in her hands.
So the day wore on in the town and country; the old sun glaring down like some fierce old judge, intolerant of weakness or shams,--baking the hard earth in the streets harder for the horses' feet, drying up the bits of grass that grew between the boulders of the gutter, scaling off the paint from the brazen faces of the interminable brick houses.
He looked down in that city as in every American town, as in these where you and I live, on the same countless maze of human faces going day by day through the same monotonous routine.