ends, but with women of a different world; evenings when the
destination was not a country estate, but a road-house; evenings when
Johnny Rosenfeld, ousted from the driver's seat by some drunken youth,
would hold tight to the swinging car and say such fragments of prayers
as he could remember. Johnny Rosenfeld, who had started life with few
illusions, was in danger of losing such as he had.

One such night Christine put in, lying wakefully in her bed, while the
clock on the mantel tolled hour after hour into the night. Palmer did
not come home at all. He sent a note from the office in the morning:

"I hope you are not worried, darling. The car broke down near the
Country Club last night, and there was nothing to do but to spend the
night there. I would have sent you word, but I did not want to rouse
you. What do you say to the theater to-night and supper afterward?"

Christine was learning. She telephoned the Country Club that morning,
and found that Palmer had not been there. But, although she knew now
that he was deceiving her, as he always had deceived her, as probably
he always would, she hesitated to confront him with what she knew. She
shrank, as many a woman has shrunk before, from confronting him with his
lie.

But the second time it happened, she was roused. It was almost Christmas
then, and Sidney was well on the way to recovery, thinner and very
white, but going slowly up and down the staircase on K.'s arm, and
sitting with Harriet and K. at the dinner table. She was begging to be
back on duty for Christmas, and K. felt that he would have to give her
up soon.

At three o'clock one morning Sidney roused from a light sleep to hear a
rapping on her door.

"Is that you, Aunt Harriet?" she called.

"It's Christine. May I come in?"

Sidney unlocked her door. Christine slipped into the room. She carried a
candle, and before she spoke she looked at Sidney's watch on the bedside
table.

"I hoped my clock was wrong," she said. "I am sorry to waken you,
Sidney, but I don't know what to do."

"Are you ill?"

"No. Palmer has not come home."

"What time is it?"

"After three o'clock."

Sidney had lighted the gas and was throwing on her dressing-gown.

"When he went out did he say--"

"He said nothing. We had been quarreling. Sidney, I am going home in the
morning."

"You don't mean that, do you?"

"Don't I look as if I mean it? How much of this sort of thing is a woman
supposed to endure?"

"Perh