f
paper which she found in its place.

Her first wild thought of rushing to the police-station she had
dismissed as useless. She had no idea when or where the theft had been
accomplished; only she knew that she was alone in a strange city, and
that the few shillings left to her were not even sufficient to pay for
the rent she already owed for her room.

She dragged herself to the window and stood looking out across the grimy
house-tops. Her eyes were blurred with tears. It is doubtful whether she
saw anything of the uninspiring view, but it seemed to her that she
could certainly see the wreck of her own short life. She seemed to
realize then the mad folly of her journey, the hopelessness of it from
beginning to end. Quite apart from her failure, there was also a madness
of which she refused even to think, the aftertaste of those few hours of
delicious happiness. Had he ever tried to find her out, she wondered,
since that day when she had fled with burning cheeks and aching heart
from her rooms in Coniston Mansions, and sought to hide herself in the
cold bosom of this unlovely city. In any case she would never see him
again. Her one desire now, if it amounted to a desire, when all ways in
life seemed to her alike flat and profitless, was to find her way
somehow or other back to America, and to carry the bad news herself to
the little farmhouse in the valley.

She looked at her pitiful little store of coins, and the problem of
existence seemed to become more and more difficult. After all, there was
another way for those who did not care to live. She found herself
harbouring the thought without a single sign of any revulsion of
feeling, accepting it as a matter to be seriously considered with dull,
calculating fatalism. What was the use of life when nothing remained to
hope for! It was, after all, an easy way out.

She opened the window and looked below. The seven stories made her
dizzy. Nevertheless, she looked with a curious fascination to the stone
courtyard immediately underneath the window. Death would probably be
instantaneous. She leaned a little further out and then started suddenly
back into the room. A revulsion of feeling had overtaken her. It was a
hideous idea, this. For the sake of the others she must put it away from
her. She walked up and down the narrow confines of her room, and then
the necessity for action of some sort drove her out into the street.
Curiously enough, though she was being searched for