buildings.

"What shall I do? Oh, Heaven, help me! what shall I do?" sobbed Bernardine, in nervous affright. "He--he must have forgotten me."

At that moment a hand fell heavily on her shoulder.

Looking up hastily through her tears, Bernardine saw a policeman standing before her and eyeing her sharply.

"What are you doing here, my good girl?" he asked. "Waiting for somebody? I would advise you to move on. We're going to have a storm, and pretty quick, too, and I judge that it will be a right heavy one."

"I--I am waiting for my husband," faltered Bernardine. "He drove me here in a cab. I was to do a little shopping while he went to find a boarding-house. He was to return in an hour---by six o'clock. I--I have been waiting here since that time, and--and he has not come."

"Hum! Where did you and your husband live last?" inquired the man of the brass buttons.

"We--we didn't live anywhere before. We--we were just married to-day," admitted the girl, her lovely face suffused with blushes.

"The old story," muttered the officer under his breath. "Some rascal has deluded this simple, unsophisticated girl into the belief that he has married her, then cast her adrift."

"I am going to tell you what I think, little girl," he said, speaking kindly in his bluff way. "But don't cry out, make a scene, or get hysterical. It's my opinion that the man you are waiting for don't intend to come back."

He saw the words strike her as lightning strikes and blasts a fair flower. A terrible shiver ran through the young girl, then she stood still, as though turned to stone, her face overspread with the pallor of death.

The policeman was used to all phases of human nature. He saw that this girl's grief was genuine, and felt sorry for her.

"Surely you have a home, friends, here somewhere?" he asked.

Bernardine shook her head, sobbing piteously.

"I lived in the tenement house on Canal Street that has just been burned down. My father perished in it, leaving me alone in the world--homeless, shelterless--and--and this man asked me to marry him, and--and I--did."

The policeman was convinced more than ever by her story that some 

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