mad with his obsession. He thought he saw Laura on the streets a dozen times a day: his heart turned rotten; he did not know what he should do or say, whether to run or remain. He brooded for hours over her address in the telephone directory; sitting by the phone, he trembled with excitement because its awful magic could be sounded at a gesture, because within a minute he could be with her, voice to voice.
He hunted out her home. She was living in an old frame house far out from the centre of the town. He stalked carefully about the neighborhood, keeping a block away from the house at all times, observing it obliquely, laterally, from front and back, with stealthy eye and a smothering thud of the heart, but never passing before it, never coming directly to it.
He was foul and dirty. The soles of his shoes wore through: his calloused feet beat against hot pavements. He stank.
At length, he tried to get work. Work there was in great abundance—but the princely wages of which he had been told were hard to find. He could not swear he was a carpenter, a mason. He was a dirty boy, and looked it. He was afraid. He went to the Navy Yard at Portsmouth, the Naval Base at Norfolk, the Bush Terminal—everywhere there was work, abundant work—hard labor that paid four dollars a day. This he would gladly have taken; but he found that he could not have his wages until after the second week, and that one week’s pay would be withheld to tide him over in illness, trouble, or departure.
And he had no money left.
He went to a Jew and pawned the watch Eliza had given him upon his birthday. He got five dollars on it. Then he went by boat once more to Newport News, and by trolley up the coast to Hampton. He had heard, in the thronging rumor of Norfolk, that there was work upon the flying field, and that the worker was fed and housed upon the field, at company expense.
In the little employment shack at the end of the long bridge that led across into the field, he was signed on as a laborer and searched by the sentry, who made him open his valise. Then he labored across the bridge, kneeing his heavy bag, which bulged with his soiled and disorderly belongings, before him.
He staggered at length into the rude company office and sought out
