“Promise me you’ll go straight home from here—­to bed.”

“I promise.  Marylin, one more.  One little more.  Your lips—­”

“No, no—­not now.  Go—­”

Suddenly, by a quirk in the dark, there was a flash of something down Marylin’s bare third finger, so hurriedly and so rashly that it scraped the flesh.

“That’s for you!  I’ve been afraid all day.  Touchy!  Didn’t I tell you?  Diamonds!  Now will you kiss me?  Now will you?”

In the shadow of where she stood, looking down, it was as if she gazed into a pool of fire that was reaching in flame clear up about her head, and everywhere in the conflagration Getaway’s triumphant “Now will you!  Now will you!”

“Getaway,” she cried, flecking her hand as if it burned, “where did you get this?”

“It’s for you, Fairylin, and more like it coming.  It weighs a carat and a half.  That stone’s worth more than a sealskin jacket.  You’re going to have one of those, too.  Real seal!  Now are you sore at me any more?  Now you’ve a swell kick coming, haven’t you?  Now!  Now!”

“Getaway,” she cried behind her lit hand, because her palm was to her mouth and above it her eyes showing the terror in their whites, “where did you get this?”

“There!” he said, and kissed her hotly and squarely on the lips.

Somehow, with the ring off her finger and in a little pool of its light as it lay at his feet, where he stood dazed on the sidewalk, Marylin was up the stoop, through the door, up two flights, and through her own door, slamming it, locking it, and into her room, rubbing and half crying over her left third finger where the flash had been.

She was frightened, because for all of an hour she sat on the end of the cot in her little room trembling and with her palms pressed into her eyes so tightly that the darkness spun.  There was quick connection in Marylin between what was emotional and what was merely sensory.  She knew, from the sickness at the very pit of her, how sick were her heart and her soul—­and how afraid.

She undressed in the dark—­a pale darkness relieved by a lighted window across the areaway.  The blue mercerized dress she slid over a hanger, covering it with one of her cotton nightgowns and putting it into careful place behind the cretonne curtain that served her as clothes closet.  Her petticoat, white, with a rill of lace, she folded away.  And then, in her bare feet and a pink-cotton nightgown with a blue bird machine-stitched on the yoke, stood cocked to the hurry of indistinct footsteps across her ceiling, and in the narrow slit of hallway outside her door, where the stairs led up still another flight, the-ball-of-a-foot—­squeak!  The sharp crack of a voice.  Running.

“Getaway!” cried Marylin’s heart, almost suffocating her with a dreadful spasm of intuition.

It was all so quick.  In the flash of her flung-open door, as her head in its amber cloud leaned out, Getaway, bending almost double over the upper banister, his lips in his narrow face back to show a white terribleness of strain that lingered in the memory, hurled out an arm suddenly toward two men mounting the steps of the flight below him.