niche, and indentation, formed by a projection of the brick trim between the drugstore and the next shop on. That was their place, right there. The reflectors at the back of the window, striking through the flasks and bottles, made little sunbursts of amber, gold and chartreuse green; acting on the same principle, though quite unintentionally, as the glass jars of colored water it was once customary to display in apothecary windows for just this purpose and no other. That was theirs, that little segment of the window, that little angle of the wall, that little square of the paving in front of the drugstore. How often he had stood there, when it wasn't quite eight yet, eyes oblivious of everything else around him, whistling a snatch of tune upward at the stars. Tapping his foot lightly, not in impatience, but because his foot was singing love songs to the ground.
That was their meeting place, there by Geety's Drugstore, their starting-off place. No reason; it had just come to be so. Whatever they were going to do--a soda, a movie, a dance, or just a walk--they did it from there.
So you have them, now.
One night, this night, the last night of the month, he was a little late getting there. A minute or two maybe, not more. He came hurrying along, because he didn't want her to stand there waiting for him. He was always there before her, as it was fitting he should be. But she'd be there ahead of him tonight, he was almost certain, and that was why he was hurrying so.
It was a spring-like night, one of the first this year, calendar to the contrary. The sky had hives, it was rashy with stars. And, he remembered afterward, a plane had just finished going by somewhere up there, just about then. He could hear its steady drone lingering on for a minute or two after it was gone, and then that had stilled into silence too. But he didn't look up, he had no eyes for it; he was saving them for her, for when he'd get down there to the square and find her standing there outside the drugstore.
And then when he'd finally turned the last corner and was in the square, the people were so thick, he couldn't see her for a minute anyway. They were like bees. It was as though the drugstore had been robbed, or there had been a fire, or something like that. They stood there in clusters, with scarcely a lane of clearance left in their midst. A strange hush hung over all of them. They weren't talking, they were standing there utterly quiet, not saying a word. It wasn't natural for that many people to stand there in such dreadful silence. It was as if they were frozen, stunned by something they had just seen, and unable to recover from it.
Whatever it was, it was over already. This was the aftereffect.
He threaded his way through them. He went first to the place where she should have been standing, their place, right up against the lighted window, with the powders and the toilet waters at her back. She wasn't there. There were others standing there, ranged along there, but she wasn't one of them.
She might have simply strayed off a little way, into the crowd, in the excitement of whatever this was while waiting for him to come. He rose up on his toes and tried to look over the heads of those in front of him. He couldn't see her anywhere. So then he went out into the crowd himself, once more, to try to find her, elbowing them aside, looking this way, looking that.
Suddenly he came to the curb line, hidden until now by the almost solid phalanx of people standing between him and it. They ended there. The roadway was clear, they were being kept back on all sides from it, in the form of a big hollow square. There was a policeman there to do it, and another man who wasn't a policeman, but who had deputized himself to help him do it.
There was something lying there in the big hollow square. A rag doll or something equally limp, lying there in the road. A life-sized doll. You could just see the legs and the twisted little body. They had newspapers spread