though the hand of fate was tearing out his wildly beating heart.

She tried to smile at him bravely. She understood. For a moment she
looked at him in the old way and all the pent-up love that would have,
that had done and dared everything for him struggled in her rapidly
rising and falling breast.

It was now or never. She knew it, the supreme effort. One word or look
too many from her and all would be lost. She flung her arms about him
and kissed him. "Remember--one week from to-day--a personal--in the
STAR," she panted.

She literally tore herself from his arms, gathered up her grip, and was
gone.

A week passed. The quiet little woman at the Oceanview House was still
as much a mystery to the other guests as when she arrived,
travel-stained and worn with the repressed emotion of her sacrifice.
She had appeared to show no interest in anything, to take her meals
mechanically, to stay most of the time in her room, never to enter into
any of the recreations of the famous winter resort.

Only once a day did she betray the slightest concern about anything
around her. That was when the New York papers arrived. Then she was
always first at the news-stand, and the boy handed out to her, as a
matter of habit, the STAR. Yet no one ever saw her read it. Directly
afterward she would retire to her room. There she would pore over the
first page, reading and rereading every personal in it. Sometimes she
would try reading them backward and transposing the words, as if the
message they contained might be in the form of a cryptograph.

The strain and the suspense began to show on her. Day after day passed,
until it was nearly two weeks since the parting in New York. Day after
day she grew more worn by worry and fear. What had happened?

In desperation she herself wired a personal to the paper: "Weston.
Write me at the Oceanview. Easton."

For three days she waited for an answer. Then she wired the personal
again. Still there was no reply and no hint of reply. Had they captured
him? Or was he so closely pursued that he did not dare to reply even in
the cryptic manner on which they had agreed!

She took the file of papers which she kept and again ran through the
personals, even going back to the very day after they had separated.
Perhaps she had missed one, though she knew that she could not have
done so, for she had looked at them a hundred times. Where was he? Why
did he not answer her message in some way? No one had follo