d, tended and directed in all the
operations of life that she actually failed to recognise her sensations
as those of hunger. But her unwonted exertions, the strain on her
flagging brain, the stimulus of this unprecedented day, all combined to
flush her cheek feverishly and she felt strangely weak. For the first
time it flashed over her cleared faculties that she must go somewhere
and at once. New York was too dangerous for her; she must leave it.

A very panic of terror seized her and she half expected to hear Dr.
Jarvyse's soft voice at her shoulder. She started from the shop like
one pursued, and hurried foolishly on and on in an ecstasy of flight.
The streets were now dark, and Miss Mary, who had begun life in New
York with her own private hansom, felt singularly out of place in the
jostling crowd.

She stopped at the foot of an elevated railway station, and more
because she was pushed up the steps by the hurrying mass of humanity
that scurried like ants up and down, than for any other reason, climbed
wearily up. As she sat pressed against a dirty man with a bundle, a
sudden inconsequent thought struck her, and she removed her gloves in a
leisurely way, took off her rings, dropped them into a roll of
chamois-skin in the large bag, added to them a diamond cross and
pendant from the lace at her neck and put on her gloves again. The
dirty man stared at her.

Then she lifted her eyes to a large sign above the car-windows and the
sign read:

_Avoid the biting March winds. You will find quiet, an even
temperature and perfect seclusion among the pines at restful Lakewood.
Take the ferry at 23d St._

So that when the guard announced Twenty-third Street, Miss Mary got up,
went down the stairs, tumbled with surprising facility upon a
cross-town car and made for the ferry. And the dirty man went down the
stairs with her.

Fate put Miss Mary on just the right boat for a Lakewood Special, and
hunger cleared her mind to the extent of throwing her card-case over
the rail on the way across. Her umbrella and ulster she had left
behind on the elevated train, not being accustomed to carry such
things, and they were found by a thrifty old lady in the
second-hand-clothing line, who annexed them silently and forever. So
that when she arrived at the Lakewood Station and fell among the
cabbies and hotel touts she was the perfect type of the no-longer-young
spinster, unaccompanied, awkward and light of luggage, presumably