not a popular
authoress or anything like that, I could----"

"Oh, goodness, no!" said Molly. "It's not money at all. Only I must
get away."

"We've never got on so well with any of the others," he went on
jerkily, "and she's certainly awfully fond of you--the madam is. She's
taken you everywhere, I know, and all the dinners, and the car whenever
you----"

"Mrs. Sykes has been very kind," Molly broke in dully, "but--oh, it's
no use, Mr. Sykes. It's got to be done, and putting it off only makes
her worse. So I'm going to-morrow. She'll feel better about it later."

"I hope so, I'm sure," Mr. Sykes responded doubtfully. "She was pretty
bad when I left her. That brain of hers, you know--it's a great
strain, they tell me. Hard on us all, in a way."

Molly always smiled and sighed when she remembered him and the hunched
shoulders that leaned drearily over the tonneau.

"Where'll I tell him?" he asked, and she drew tighter the tight line
between her brows, sighed, tried to speak, and found her mind quite
utterly a blank.

"Where'll I tell him?" Mr. Sykes repeated, looking curiously at her.

To save her life Molly could not have remembered where she had arranged
to go! A real horror caught her: was this the beginning of all the
dreadful symptoms that few of Julia Carter Sykes's admirers suspected
in their idol? She must say something, and there flashed suddenly into
her mind, otherwise blank of any image or phrase, an odd occurrence of
the afternoon before, an occurrence she had been too tired to try,
even, to explain.

"Drive to the docks!" she cried sharply, and the chauffeur touched his
visor, and her life poised for twenty minutes on its watershed,
although she did not know it.

In the motor it came back to her, that twilight not eighteen hours
back, when in clearing out her desk ("the last desk I shall ever clear,
I swear!") she had happened on the little transparent glass ball, a
paper-weight, she supposed, and fingered it idly, void of thought or
feeling, after the last emotional storm with her celebrity.

As she looked into it, staring, her tired mind seemed to sink and sink
and submerge in the little clear white sphere till it drowned utterly,
and only a rigid body, its eyes turned into its lap, sat in the still,
dim room.

Presently, after what might have been hours or seconds, she seemed to
gather into herself again, but could not wrench her eyes from the
crystal ball, which looked opalesc