are lovely and sweet! It's frightful--you in this life."

Her expression made the sobs choke up into his throat. She said
quietly: "Not worse than dirt and vermin and freezing cold and
long, long, dull--oh, _so_ dull hours of working among human
beings that don't ever wash--because they can't." She pushed him
gently away. "You don't understand. You haven't been through it.
Comfortable people talk like fools about those things. . . . Do
you remember my hands that first evening?"

He reddened and his eyes shifted. "I'm absurdly sensitive about
a woman's hands," he muttered.

She laughed at him. "Oh, I saw--how you couldn't bear to look
at them--how they made you shiver. Well, the hands were
nothing--_nothing_!--beside what you didn't see."

"Lorna, do you love someone else?"

His eyes demanded an honest answer, and it seemed to her his
feeling for her deserved it. But she could not put the answer
into words. She lowered her gaze.

"Then why----" he began impetuously. But there he halted, for he
knew she would not lift the veil over herself, over her past.

"I'm very, very fond of you," she said with depressing
friendliness. Then with a sweet laugh, "You ought to be glad I'm
not able to take you at your word. And you will be glad soon."
She sighed. "What a good time we've had!"

"If I only had a decent allowance, like Fatty!" he groaned.

"No use talking about that. It's best for us to separate best
for us both. You've been good to me--you'll never know how good.
And I can't play you a mean trick. I wish I could be selfish
enough to do it, but I can't."

"You don't love me. That's the reason."

"Maybe it is. Yes, I guess that's why I've got the courage to be
square with you. Anyhow, John, you can't afford to care for me.
And if I cared for you, and put off the parting--why it'd only
put off what I've got to go through with before----" She did not
finish; her eyes became dreamy.

"Before what?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said, returning with a sigh. "Something I
see--yet don't see in the darkness, ahead of me."

"I can't make you out," cried he. Her expression moved him to
the same awe she inspired in Etta--a feeling that gave both of
them the sense of having known her better, of having been more
intimate with her when they first met her than they ever had
been since or ever would be again.

When Redmond embraced and kissed her for the last time, he was
in another and less sym