element too. Edith was incredulous at first, but at
last she faced it. There was a change in Mabel. She was not less
hospitable nor less generous. It was a matter of a point of view.
Success was going to her head. Her indignation at certain phases of
life was changing to tolerance. She found Edith's rampant virtue a
trifle wearing. She took to staying out very late, and coming in
ready to meet Edith's protest with defiant gaiety. She bought
clothes too.

"You'll have to pay for them sometime," Edith reminded her.

"I should worry. I've got to look like something if I'm going to go
out at all."

Edith, who had never thought things out before, had long hours to
think now. And the one thing that seemed clear and undeniable was
that she must not drive Mabel into debt. Debt was the curse of most
of the girls she knew. As long as they were on their own they could
manage. It was the burden of unpaid bills, lightly contracted, that
drove so many of them wrong.

That night, while Mabel was asleep, she got up and cautiously
lighted the gas. Then she took the boy's photograph out of its
hiding place and propped it on top of her trunk. For a long time she
sat there, her chin in her hands, and looked at it.

It was the next day that she saw his name among the missing.

She did not cry, not at first. The time came when it seemed to her
she did nothing else. But at first she only stared. She was too
young and too strong to faint, but things went gray for her.

And gray they remained--through long spring days and eternal
nights--days when Mabel slept all morning, rehearsed or played in
the afternoons, was away all evening and far into the night. She did
not eat or sleep. She spent money that was meant for food on papers
and journals and searched for news. She made a frantic but
ineffectual effort to get into the War Office.

She had received his letter two days after she had seen his name
among the missing. She had hardly dared to open it, but having read
it, for days she went round with a strange air of consecration that
left Mabel uneasy.

"I wish you wouldn't look like that!" she said one morning. "You get
on my nerves."

But as time went on the feeling that he was dead overcame everything
else. She despaired, rather than grieved. And following despair came
recklessness. He was dead. Nothing else mattered. Lethway, meeting
her one day in Oxford Circus, almost passed her before he knew her.
He stopped her then.

"Have