ooking at him from an ashen face. "He
told me there was no reason why I should not try my luck," he said
difficultly. "I asked him."

There was a silence, while he gazed at her, breathing deeply. Then he
tried to laugh.

"All right," he said hoarsely. "It--it doesn't matter. Don't worry."

She stretched out her hand to him in a gesture of wistful pain, and he
held it a moment between both of his, then released it and went
hurriedly out.

* * * * *

As the door closed, Shirley sat down, her head dropping into her hands
like a storm-broken flower. Valiant had accepted the finality of the
situation. With a wave of deeper hopelessness than had yet submerged
her, she realized that, against her own decision, something deep within
her had taken shy and secret comfort in his stubborn masculine refusal.
Against all fact, in face of the impossible, her heart had been clinging
to this--as though his love might even attain the miraculous and
somewhere, somehow, recreate circumstance. But now he, too, had bowed to
the decree. A kind of utter apathetic wretchedness seized upon her, to
replace the sharp misery that had so long been her companion--an empty
numbness in which, in a measure, she ceased to feel.

An hour dragged slowly by and at length she rose and went slowly up the
stairs. Her head felt curiously heavy, but it did not ache. Outside her
mother's door, as was her custom, she paused mechanically to listen. A
tiny pencil of light struck through the darkness and painted a spot of
brightness on her gown. It came through the keyhole; the lamp in her
mother's room was burning. "She has fallen asleep and forgotten it," she
thought, and softly turning the knob, pushed the door noiselessly open
and entered.

A moment she stood listening to the low regular breathing of the
sleeper. The reading-lamp shed a shaded glow on the pillow with its
spread-out silver hair, and on the delicate hands clasped loosely on the
coverlet. Shirley came close and looked down on the placid face. It was
smooth as a child's and a smile touched it lightly as if some pleasant
sleep-thought had just laid rosy fingers on the dreaming lips. The
light caught and sparkled from something bright that lay between her
mother's hands. It was the enamel brooch that held her own baby curl,
and she saw suddenly that what she had all her life thought was a solid
pendant, was now open locket-wise and that the two halves clasped a
mi