n't sure that she wanted to.

Mom Beck brought up the daintiest of dinners on a tray, but carried it
back almost untasted. As soon as she was gone, Lloyd undressed and crept
into bed.

Sleep was far from her, however, and she lay with her eyes wide open.
The room was full of soft shadows and the flicker of firelight on the
furniture. She could think of only one thing, and she brooded over that
until it seemed to her feverish, disordered fancy that her
disappointment was the greatest that any one had ever been forced to
bear.

"Why couldn't it have happened to some girl who didn't care?" she
thought, bitterly. "Some girl like Maud Minor, who doesn't like school,
anyhow. It doesn't seem fair when I've tried my best to do exactly
right, to leave a road of the loving hah't in everybody's memory, to
keep the tryst--"

That thought brought a fresh reason for grief. There was the string of
pearls. Now she could not finish her little white rosary. The fire
flared up and shone brilliantly for a few moments, lighting a group of
pictures over her bed. They were the photographs she had taken in
Arizona. There was Ware's Wigwam. The firelight was not bright enough to
enable her to read the lines Joyce had written under it, but she knew
the inscription was the Ware family's motto, taken from the "Vicar of
Wakefield": "Let us be inflexible, and fortune will at last change in
our favour." A shadow of a smile actually came to her lips as she
remembered Mary Ware gravely explaining it.

"Why, even Norman knows that if you'll swallow your sobs and _stiffen_
when you bump your head or anything, it doesn't hurt half as bad as if
you just let loose and howl."

And there was the photograph of old Camelback Mountain, bringing back
the story of Shapur, left helpless on the sands of the Desert of
Waiting, while the caravan passed on without him to the City of his
Desire. She remembered that when she hung it over her bed she had
thought, "If ever _I_ come to such a place, this will help me to bear
it patiently."

Then she thought of Joyce, how bravely and uncomplainingly she had met
her disappointment. Not only had she left school and given up her
ambition to be an artist, but she had had to give up the old home she
loved, all her friends, and everything that made her girlhood bright, to
go out into the lonely desert and work like a squaw.

The thought of Joyce brought back all the lessons she had learned in the
School of the Bees. But