ss was beauty and romance to her;
yet it was at the moment when Elmer Moffatt's failure was most complete
and flagrant that she suddenly felt the extent of his power. After the
Eubaw Avenue scandal he had been asked not to return to the surveyor's
office to which Ben Frusk had managed to get him admitted; and on the
day of his dismissal he met Undine in Main Street, at the shopping hour,
and, sauntering up cheerfully, invited her to take a walk with him. She
was about to refuse when she saw Millard Binch's mother looking at her
disapprovingly from the opposite street-corner.

"Oh, well, I will--" she said; and they walked the length of Main Street
and out to the immature park in which it ended. She was in a mood of
aimless discontent and unrest, tired of her engagement to Millard Binch,
disappointed with Moffatt, half-ashamed of being seen with him, and yet
not sorry to have it known that she was independent enough to choose her
companions without regard to the Apex verdict.

"Well, I suppose you know I'm down and out," he began; and she responded
virtuously: "You must have wanted to be, or you wouldn't have behaved
the way you did last Sunday."

"Oh, shucks!" he sneered. "What do I care, in a one-horse place like
this? If it hadn't been for you I'd have got a move on long ago."

She did not remember afterward what else he said: she recalled only the
expression of a great sweeping scorn of Apex, into which her own disdain
of it was absorbed like a drop in the sea, and the affirmation of a
soaring self-confidence that seemed to lift her on wings. All her own
attempts to get what she wanted had come to nothing; but she had always
attributed her lack of success to the fact that she had had no one to
second her. It was strange that Elmer Moffatt, a shiftless out-cast from
even the small world she despised, should give her, in the very moment
of his downfall, the sense of being able to succeed where she had
failed. It was a feeling she never had in his absence, but that his
nearness always instantly revived; and he seemed nearer to her now than
he had ever been. They wandered on to the edge of the vague park, and
sat down on a bench behind the empty band-stand.

"I went with that girl on purpose, and you know it," he broke out
abruptly. "It makes me too damned sick to see Millard Binch going round
looking as if he'd patented you."

"You've got no right--" she interrupted; and suddenly she was in his
arms, and feeling t