t of giving up this mystic
relation to the life she had missed. In spite of the hurry and fatigue
of her days, the shabbiness and discomfort of everything, and the hours
when the children were as "horrid" as any other children, and turned a
conspiracy of hostile faces to all her appeals; in spite of all this
she did not want to give them up, and had decided, when their parents
returned, to ask to go back to America with them. Perhaps, if Nat's
success continued, and Grace was able to work at her music, they would
need a kind of governess-companion. At any rate, she could picture no
future less distasteful.

She had not sent to Mr. Spearman Nick's answer to her letter. In the
interval between writing to him and receiving his reply she had broken
with Strefford; she had therefore no object in seeking her freedom. If
Nick wanted his, he knew he had only to ask for it; and his silence, as
the weeks passed, woke a faint hope in her. The hope flamed high when
she read one day in the newspapers a vague but evidently "inspired"
allusion to the possibility of an alliance between his Serene Highness
the reigning Prince of Teutoburg-Waldhain and Miss Coral Hicks of
Apex City; it sank to ashes when, a few days later, her eye lit on a
paragraph wherein Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer Hicks "requested to state" that
there was no truth in the report.

On the foundation of these two statements Susy raised one watch-tower
of hope after another, feverish edifices demolished or rebuilt by every
chance hint from the outer world wherein Nick's name figured with the
Hickses'. And still, as the days passed and she heard nothing, either
from him or from her lawyer, her flag continued to fly from the quaking
structures.

Apart from the custody of the children there was indeed little to
distract her mind from these persistent broodings. She winced sometimes
at the thought of the ease with which her fashionable friends had let
her drop out of sight. In the perpetual purposeless rush of their days,
the feverish making of winter plans, hurrying off to the Riviera or St.
Moritz, Egypt or New York, there was no time to hunt up the vanished
or to wait for the laggard. Had they learned that she had broken her
"engagement" (how she hated the word!) to Strefford, and had the fact
gone about that she was once more only a poor hanger-on, to be taken up
when it was convenient, and ignored in the intervals? She did not know;
though she fancied Strefford's newly-dev