e
clutch of it upon his own heart. She or some impish power acting through
her agency had certainly made a mess of things. Her father's happiness
destroyed; Rush's partnership broken; and the whole Hickory Hill project
ruined unless some one could be found to buy into it in Graham's place;
Graham humiliated, utterly cast adrift, irreparably hurt. And the
prospect for the future....

She had told him of her tramp about the streets yesterday with her
newspaper clipping and he was able to feel the full terror of it; and,
beyond the terror, the gray emptiness.

There was only one way out of the tangle and this was to marry the man
she loved and knew loved her. Well, he knew with merciless certainty what
her answer would be when he asked her--begged her--to do that. He had
provided her with the answer himself, with his sophomoric talk about
traveling light and refusing to wear harness. And he'd worse than
talked. His flight from her at Hickory Hill was enough to show that these
weren't mere empty phrases. And yet her life depended to-night upon his
ability to persuade her, in the face of those phrases and that fact, to
marry him. So he sat very still, wondering how soon she would divine
these undercurrents of his thought, listening while she talked to him.

The hours were slipping away, too. A glance at the watch braceleted upon
the wrist he held startled him and he covered it with his hand. Had they
already, he wondered, begun a search for her? Her words supplied
presently the answer to that question. She was talking, with a dry sort
of humor, about the commotions of that day.

He could not be sure he was getting it quite straight, for she was
commenting upon events rather than narrating them. Apparently she had
telephoned to her brother at Hood's apartment immediately after young
Stannard left the house the evening or afternoon before, telling him not
to bother about her, as she was going straight to bed. Let him go to a
show and be careful not to wake her when he came in. She'd done this and
gone to sleep at once, not waking until she'd heard him getting ready
for bed in the adjoining room. But after that she hadn't been able to
get off again.

March reflected, with a shudder, what a ghastly procession of hours those
must have been. Had it been then, he wondered, that, looking for some
harmless thing to help her sleep, she had come upon the deadlier stuff?

Her encounter with her brother at breakfast, which she had