untains on its horizon.

Someway, the mortgage had grown smaller; no one seemed to care about it
but herself. She had felt vaguely that they would be expecting her and
have themselves steeled against her request. On the way from the station
she had thought that people were looking at her curiously as the woman
from "up toward Pinacate" who was about to lose her home on a mortgage.
She had even felt that some of them knew of the little wire-fenced grave
on the edge of the barley-field.

She showed the card to a boy at the corner, who pointed out the street
and told her to watch for the number over the door.

"It isn't very far; 'bout four blocks up on the right-hand side. Yuh kin
take the street car fer a nickel, er yuh kin walk fi' cents cheaper," he
volunteered, whereupon an older boy kicked him affectionately, and
advised him in a nauseated tone to "come off."

Nancy walked along the smooth cement pavement, looking anxiously at the
houses behind their sentinel palms. The vagaries of Western architecture
conveyed no impression but that of splendor to her uncritical eye. The
house whose number corresponded to the one on her card was less
pretentious than some of the others, but the difference was lost upon
her in the general sense of grandeur.

She went up the steps and rang the bell, with the same stifling clutch
on her throat that she had felt in the bank. There was a little pause,
and then the door opened, and Nancy saw a fragile, girl-like woman with
a tear-stained face standing before her.

"Does Mr. Bartlett live here?" faltered the visitor, her chin trembling.

The young creature leaned forward like a flower wilting on its stem, and
buried her face on Nancy's dusty shoulder.

"Oh, I'm so glad to see you," she sobbed; "I thought no one ever
_would_ come. I didn't know before that people were so afraid of scarlet
fever. They have taken my baby away for fear he would take it. Do you
know anything about it? Please come right in where she is, and tell me
what you think."

Nancy had put her gaunt arm around the girl's waist, and was patting her
quivering shoulder with one cotton-gloved hand. Two red spots had come
on her high cheek-bones, and her lips were working. She let herself be
led across the hall into an adjoining room, where a yellow-haired child
lay restless and fever stricken. A young man with a haggard face came
forward and greeted her eagerly. "Now, Flora," he said, smoothing his
wife's disordered