ie is happy because he has made money;
the pretty woman is happy because she is loved--but the pale girl and
the bent shouldered clerk are wretched. They have neither love nor
money, and they have not found out how little either is worth."

For a while she watched them, almost forgetting her own unhappiness in
the excitement of their discovered histories; but wearying suddenly, she
turned away and entered a street where the darkness had already
gathered. Here she came close upon a pair of lovers who walked arm in
arm, but the sight irritated her so she turned again at the next corner.
The question whether she should go home or not thrust itself upon her,
and it seemed to her that it would be better to die in the street than
to return to the persuasions of Gerty, the reproaches of Mrs. Payne, and
the complacency of Kemper. As she hurried on in the darkness she saw her
past as distinctly as if her eyes were turned backward, and in this
vision of it there showed to her the steep upward way of the spirit, and
she remembered the day when her destiny had seemed to lie mapped out for
her in the hand of God. "Was this what God meant?" she demanded, and
because there was no answer to the question she asked it again and again
the more passionately. "Or perhaps there is no God after all," she
added.

A sob broke from her lips, and a policeman, who was passing, threw first
an enquiring, then a respectful glance at her, and went on again. A
child playing in the street ran up to beg for some money, and she opened
her bag and gave him a piece of silver with a smile.

"Thank you, lady," he responded, and ran back into the shadows. As he
crossed the street she followed him with her eyes, seeing him hasten,
his palm outstretched, to an Italian who was roasting chestnuts in a
charcoal burner on the opposite sidewalk.

The darkness had grown heavier and as she walked rapidly through streets
which she did not know, her nervous energy failed her, and she began to
tremble presently from exhaustion. Again she asked herself for the last
time if it were possible for her to go home and face Mrs. Payne and
Gerty and marry Kemper in three days. A fantastic humour in the
situation brought a laugh to her lips--for whenever she was confronted
by the hopelessness of her escape, the arguments for her marriage
presented themselves to her in the forms of cases of silver and of her
wedding dress in its white satin box. Mrs. Payne had spent the
afternoo