CONFESSIONAL
cheerfully. And she told him "Good night" in her turn.
For a moment she seemed a bit hesitant and fearful, left thus alone. The house in front of which she stood, like its neighbors, reared a high façade to the tender, star-lit sky, its windows, with drawn shades and no lights, wearing a singular look of blind patience. It had a high stoop and a sunken area. There was a dull glow in one of the basement windows.
It was very late,—or extremely early. The moon was down, though its place was in some way filled by the golden disk of the clock in the Grand Central Station's tower. The air was impregnated with the sweet and fragrant breath of the new-born day. In the tunnel beneath the street a trolley-car rumbled and whined and clanked lonesomely. A stray cat wandered out of a cross-street with the air of a seasoned debauchee; stopped, scratched itself with inimitable abandon, and suddenly, mysteriously alarmed at nothing, turned itself into a streak of shadow that fled across the street and vanished.
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