e were upon a most daring and fateful adventure. And, as a matter
of fact, never in her life had she done anything that so intensely
interested her. She felt that she was for the first time slackening
rein upon those unconventional instincts, of unknown strength and
purpose, which had been making her restless with their vague stirrings.

"How silly of me!" she thought. "I'm doing a commonplace, rather
common thing--and I'm trying to make it seem a daring, romantic
adventure. I MUST be hard up for excitement!"

Toward the middle of the afternoon she dropped from her horse before
the office of the New Day and gave a boy the bridle. "I'll be back in a
minute," she explained. It was a two-story frame building, dingy and
in disrepair. On the street floor was a grocery. Access to the New
Day was by a rickety stairway. As she ascended this, making a great
noise on its unsteady boards with her boots, she began to feel cheap
and foolish. She recalled what Hull had said in the carriage. "No
doubt," replied she, "I'd feel much the same way if I were going to see
Jesus Christ--a carpenter's son, sitting in some hovel, talking with
his friends the fishermen and camel drivers--not to speak of the women."

The New Day occupied two small rooms--an editorial work room, and a
printing work room behind it. Jane Hastings, in the doorway at the
head of the stairs, was seeing all there was to see. In the editorial
room were two tables--kitchen tables, littered with papers and
journals, as was the floor, also. At the table directly opposite the
door no one was sitting--"Victor Dorn's desk," Jane decided. At the
table by the open window sat a girl, bent over her writing. Jane saw
that the figure was below, probably much below, the medium height for
woman, that it was slight and strong, that it was clad in a simple,
clean gray linen dress. The girl's black hair, drawn into a plain but
distinctly graceful knot, was of that dense and wavy thickness which is
a characteristic and a beauty of the Hebrew race. The skin at the nape
of her neck, on her hands, on her arms bare to the elbows was of a
beautiful dead-white--the skin that so admirably compliments dead-black
hair.

Before disturbing this busy writer Jane glanced round. There was
nothing to detain her in the view of the busy printing plant in the
room beyond. But on the walls of the room before her were four
pictures--lithographs, cheap, not framed, held in place by a ta