ably. "H'm!"

"No one must know, not even Doctor and Mother," pursued Julia. "No
newspapers, _nobody_!"

"Well, in any case, that's wise!" the older woman assented. "And where
will you go--to Sally?"

"No!" Julia said with a quick shudder. "Not anywhere near here! No, I
should rather like to give the impression that I will be with Jim, or
near Jim," she added slowly.

"Following him abroad with the baby, that's quite natural!" Miss Toland
approved. "But why not stay a week or two in Sausalito, just to keep
them from guessing?"

"Oh, I couldn't!" Julia said, in a quick breath.

"And where'll you go--New York?"

"Oh, no!" Julia leaned back and shut her eyes. The muscles of her throat
worked. "We were so happy in New York," she said, with a sudden
quivering of her lips. But a moment's struggle brought back her
composure. "I thought--some little French village, or England," she
hazarded.

"England," Miss Toland said promptly. "This is no time of the year to
take a child to France; besides, you get better milk in England, and if
Anna was sick, there's London, full of doctors who speak your own
language."

"So long as it's quiet," Julia said, "and we see nobody--that's all I
care about. Then if Jim should--But I couldn't wait here, with everybody
asking, and inviting me places, and spying on me!"

"We'll take some sort of little place in Oxfordshire," Miss Toland said,
"and then we can run up to London--"

"'We?'" Julia echoed. She gazed bewilderedly at the other woman for a
moment, then put her hands over her face and burst into tears.

A month like a nightmare followed. Julia had never grown to care for the
Pacific Avenue house; now it came to have an absolute horror for her.
She seemed to see it through a veil of darkness; she seemed to move
under the burden of an intolerable weight. Sometimes she found herself
panting as if for air, as she went from silent room to silent room, and
sometimes a memory unbearably poignant and dear smote her as with
physical violence, and her face worked for a few moments, and she fought
with tears.

There were other times, when life seemed less sad than dull. Julia grew
sick of loneliness, sick of silence; she stared at her face in the
mirror, when she was slowly dressing in the morning; stared at herself
again at night--as if marvelling at this woman who was a wife, and a
mother, and deserted in her young bloom. Deserted--her husband had gone
away from her, and she knew no