k that did not compromise her would be
better. But if she failed now, she would lose her soul. There was
nowhere to fall, after one took that step, except into abysses of
wretchedness. She knew what abysses, for she could still hear the old
man playing in the snowstorm, it was released in her like a passion of
longing. Every nerve in her body thrilled to it. It brought her to her
feet, carried her somehow to bed and into troubled sleep.

That night she taught in Moonstone again: she beat her pupils in hideous
rages, she kept on beating them. She sang at funerals, and struggled at
the piano with Harsanyi. In one dream she was looking into a hand-glass
and thinking that she was getting better-looking, when the glass began
to grow smaller and smaller and her own reflection to shrink, until she
realized that she was looking into Ray Kennedy's eyes, seeing her face
in that look of his which she could never forget. All at once the eyes
were Fred Ottenburg's, and not Ray's. All night she heard the shrieking
of trains, whistling in and out of Moonstone, as she used to hear them
in her sleep when they blew shrill in the winter air. But to-night they
were terrifying,--the spectral, fated trains that "raced with death,"
about which the old woman from the depot used to pray.

In the morning she wakened breathless after a struggle with Mrs. Livery
Johnson's daughter. She started up with a bound, threw the blankets back
and sat on the edge of the bed, her night-dress open, her long braids
hanging over her bosom, blinking at the daylight. After all, it was not
too late. She was only twenty years old, and the boat sailed at noon.
There was still time!

PART VI. KRONBORG

I

It is a glorious winter day. Denver, standing on her high plateau under
a thrilling green-blue sky, is masked in snow and glittering with
sunlight. The Capitol building is actually in armor, and throws off the
shafts of the sun until the beholder is dazzled and the outlines of the
building are lost in a blaze of reflected light. The stone terrace is a
white field over which fiery reflections dance, and the trees and bushes
are faithfully repeated in snow--on every black twig a soft, blurred
line of white. From the terrace one looks directly over to where the
mountains break in their sharp, familiar lines against the sky. Snow
fills the gorges, hangs in scarfs on the great slopes, and on the peaks
the fiery sunshine is gathered up as by a burning-g