Kedzie was wakened by murmurous voices. A man was talking to a woman.
They might have been Romeo and Juliet in Verona for the poetry of
their grief, but they were in the Bronx Borough, and he was valet
and she a housemaid, or so Kedzie judged. The man was saying in a
dialect new to Kedzie:
"Ah, _ma pauvre p'tite amie,_ for why you have a _jalousie_
of my _patrie_?"
There was a vague discussion from which Kedzie drowsily gleaned
that the man was going to cross the sea to the realm of destruction.
The girl was jealous of somebody that he called his _patrie,_
and he miserably endeavored to persuade her that a man could love
both his _patrie_ and his _amie_, and yet give his life
to the former at her call.
Kedzie was too sleepy to feel much curiosity. A neighbor's woe is
a soothing lullaby. In the very crisis of their debate, the little
moan of Kedzie's yawn startled and silenced the farewellers. They
stole away unseen, and she knew no more of them.
Hours later Kedzie woke, shivering and afraid. All about her was
a woodland hush, but the circle of the horizon was dimly lighted,
as if there were houses on fire everywhere in the distance.
Poor Kedzie was a-cold and filled with the night dread. She was
afraid of burglars, mice, ghosts. She was still more afraid to leave
her bench and hunt through those deep shadows for her lost New York.
Her drugged brain fell asleep as it wrestled with its fears. Her body
protested at its couch.
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