sion, their unfinished sentences
dangled over bottomless pits of conjecture, and they gave their
bewildered hearer the impression not so much of talking only of their
intimates, as of being intimate with every one alive.

Her old friend Franklin Ide could have told her, perhaps; but here was
the last day of the voyage, and she hadn't yet found courage to ask him.
Great as had been the joy of discovering his name on the passenger-list
and seeing his friendly bearded face in the throng against the taffrail
at Cherbourg, she had as yet said nothing to him except, when they had
met: "Of course I'm going out to Leila."

She had said nothing to Franklin Ide because she had always
instinctively shrunk from taking him into her confidence. She was sure
he felt sorry for her, sorrier perhaps than any one had ever felt;
but he had always paid her the supreme tribute of not showing it. His
attitude allowed her to imagine that compassion was not the basis of his
feeling for her, and it was part of her joy in his friendship that it
was the one relation seemingly unconditioned by her state, the only one
in which she could think and feel and behave like any other woman.

Now, however, as the problem of New York loomed nearer, she began to
regret that she had not spoken, had not at least questioned him about
the hints she had gathered on the way. He did not know the two ladies
next to her, he did not even, as it chanced, know Mrs. Lorin Boulger;
but he knew New York, and New York was the sphinx whose riddle she must
read or perish.

Almost as the thought passed through her mind his stooping shoulders
and grizzled head detached themselves against the blaze of light in the
west, and he sauntered down the empty deck and dropped into the chair at
her side.

"You're expecting the Barkleys to meet you, I suppose?" he asked.

It was the first time she had heard any one pronounce her daughter's
new name, and it occurred to her that her friend, who was shy and
inarticulate, had been trying to say it all the way over and had at last
shot it out at her only because he felt it must be now or never.

"I don't know. I cabled, of course. But I believe she's at--they're
at--_his_ place somewhere."

"Oh, Barkley's; yes, near Lenox, isn't it? But she's sure to come to
town to meet you."

He said it so easily and naturally that her own constraint was relieved,
and suddenly, before she knew what she meant to do, she had burst out:
"She may disli