Just as the editor was reading the first line of the poem, on the next morning, a being stumbled off the West Shore ferryboat, and loped slowly up Forty-second Street.
     The invader was a young man with light blue eyes, a hanging lip and hair the exact color of the little orphan's (afterward discovered to be the earl's daughter) in one of Mr. Blaney's plays. His trousers were corduroy, his coat short-sleeved, with buttons in the middle of his back. One bootleg was outside the corduroys. You looked expectantly, though in vain, at his straw hat for ear holes, its shape inaugurating the suspicion that it had been ravaged from a former equine possessor. In his hand was a valise - description of it is an impossible task; a Boston man would not have carried his lunch and law books to his office in it. And above one ear, in his hair, was a wisp of hay - the rustic's letter of credit, his badge of innocence, the last clinging touch of the Garden of Eden lingering to shame the gold-brick men.
Fifteen year old Katerina pulls her coat close round her thin body and slips back out of sight under the Bridge Tower. She runs home through the streets of Prague's Old Town and sits shivering in her bed.
     The next day, her grey-faced father says,
     "Your mother's gone. Gone like the cheating whore she is."
     He glances at Katerina's crushed expression and adds,
     "It's no use crying. She's gone for good this time. Off with one of her men."
     It's possible this is what's happened. He's heard nothing from his neighbours about a drowning and he could easily have imagined what he thinks he saw. Katerina says nothing. But then, she always says nothing. She hasn't spoken since she was two years old.