antly she wondered at her feeling the
need of safety from him. Glancing back over Lawrence's head, she met
Ortez's eyes and read in their look a tenderness that he did not know
was there. Her heart leaped unsteadily, and her lashes dropped. She was
saying to herself, "How wonderful he is!"

Then she turned and almost ran behind the curtain that walled her room.
On the edge of her bed she sat, her face in her hands, hot tears burning
her eyes, while over and over the blood rushed into her cheeks and out
again.

"Claire! Claire! What sort of a woman are you?" she moaned.

Her heart beat irregularly under the surge of emotion that shook her.
She was glad, glad that Lawrence loved her. She had looked into the eyes
of Philip Ortez, and her own had dropped, while her mind had leaped into
admiration of him, warm, yielding admiration. What was it that had swept
her on the discovery of one man's love to a deep, vibrant gladness--that
another man's eyes had been filled with tenderness for her? Was she so
changed from the Claire of old? Was she utterly degraded? Did she want
both men to love her? Did she love either of them? What of her husband?
She sank down on the bed and wept silently.

They were talking out there in the cabin. She heard Lawrence say
laughingly: "One gets accustomed to hearing your voices around, and to
hearing Claire do things, so that a day alone seems endless."

"Hearing Claire do things"--that was it--and suppose he knew what she
was, would he want to hear her then?

"Oh, I know," Philip was answering. "It gets to be a sort of necessity,
doesn't it, when we have so many associations and memories all among
ourselves? I shall find the place dreary next winter, I am afraid, when
you are back among your friends, and Claire"--he paused slightly--"will
be going about as ever, doing things for her husband somewhere up there
in the States."

Would her husband ever imagine or discover what she was? If he did, he
would leave her. She remembered a girl in the slums at home who had
refused to be uplifted. "Aw, one fellow ain't enough. A plain ham is all
right for some, but I want a club-sandwich." She shuddered now at the
memory of the girl's words, and shrank together on her bed. Was she
another of that sort, abnormal, degenerate, whose life must find its
level at last in the sordid riot of promiscuity, disguising itself as
love? If Claire had never touched the bed-rock of self-abasement before,
she was doing