de of her window kept up a running accompaniment to the
words. "It is a sin--and there is no other way to stop it. He is
committing a sin, and when I see him he will understand it, and it will
be as it was before." This idea, which was as fixed as an obsession of
delirium, seemed to occupy some central space in her brain, leaving room
for a crowd of lesser thoughts which came and went fantastically around
it like the motley throng of a circus. She thought of Cyrus Treadwell's
accident, of the stupid jokes the man from Dinwiddie had told her, of
the noises of the train, which would not let one sleep, of the stations
which blazed out, here and there, in the darkness. But in the midst of
this confusion of images and impressions, a clear voice was repeating
somewhere in her brain: "This is the way--there is no other way to stop
it before it is too late."

In the morning, when she got out in New York, and gave the driver the
name of the little hotel at which she had stopped on her first visit,
this glowing certainty faded like the excitement of fever from her mind,
and she relapsed into the stricken hopelessness of the last six months.
The bleakness of her spirits fell like a cloud on the brilliant October
day, and the sunshine, which lay in golden pools on the pavements,
appeared to increase the sense of universal melancholy which had
followed so sharply on the brief exaltation of the night. "I must see
him--it is the only way," her brain still repeated, but the ring of
conviction was gone from the words. Her flight from Dinwiddie showed to
her now in all the desperate folly with which it might have appeared to
a stranger. The impulse which had brought her had ebbed away, and with
the impulse had passed also the confidence and the energy of her
resolve.

At the hotel, where the red bedroom into which they ushered her appeared
to have waited unaltered for the second tragedy of her life, she bathed
and dressed herself, and after a cup of black coffee, taken because a
sensation of dizziness had alarmed her lest she should faint in the
street, she put on her hat again and went out into Fifth Avenue. She
remembered the name of the hotel at the head of Oliver's letter, and she
directed her steps towards it now with an automatic precision of which
her mind seemed almost unconscious. All thought of asking for him had
vanished, yet she was drawn to the place where he was by a force which
was more irresistible than any choice of the