THE AMATEUR LOVER
hunch of fear. Stooping to push her slippery new suit case closer under her feet, he caught the sharp, shuddering tremor of her knees, and as the automo- bile swayed finally into the street that led to his apartment, her lungs seemed to crumple up in a paroxysm of coughing. Under the garish lights that marked his apartment-house doorway her slight figure drooped like a tired flower, and the footsteps that tinkled behind him along the stone corridor rang in his ears with a dear, shy, girlish reluctance. The elevator had stopped running. One flight, two flights, three, four, five they toiled up the harsh, cool, metallic stairway. Four times Ruth stopped to get her breath, and twice to tie her shoe. Drew laughed to himself at the delicious subterfuge of it.
Then at the very top of the strange, gloomy, mid night building, when Drew's nervous fingers fum bled a second with his door-lock, without the slight est possible warning she reached out suddenly with one mad, frenzied impulse and struck the key from his hand. To his startled eyes she turned a face more vild, more agonized than any terror he had ever dreamed in his most hideous, sweating night mare. Instantly her hands went clutching out to him.
"Oh, Drew, for God's sake take me home !" she gasped. "What have I done ? What have I done ?
What have I done? Oh, ALECK !"
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