nd shouting for their companions
and toboggans. But it was not till all had gone out and their voices had
died away on the clear, cold air, that the sleeper in No. 19 awoke. For
a while she lay with open eyes as still as though she were yet sleeping.
But suddenly she started up in bed and looked around her with frowning,
startled attention. She was in a rather large, bare bedroom with
varnished green wood-work and furniture and a green pottery stove. There
was an odd, thick paper on the wall, of no particular color, and a
painted geometrical pattern in the centre of the ceiling. It was a neat
room, on the whole, but on the bed beside her own a man's waistcoat had
been thrown, and in the middle of the floor a pair of long, shabby
slippers lay a yard apart from each other and upside down. There were
other little signs of masculine occupation. A startled movement brought
her sitting up on the bedside.

"Married!" she whispered to herself. "How perfectly awful!"

A fiery wave of anger that was almost hate swept through her veins,
anger against the unknown husband and against that other one who had the
power thus to dispose of her destiny, while she lay helpless in some
unfathomed deep between life and death. Swifter than light her thoughts
flew back to the last hours of consciousness which had preceded that
strange and terrible engulfment of her being. She remembered that Mr.
Stewart had tried to propose to her on the river and that she had not
allowed him to do so. Probably he had taken this as a refusal. She knew
nothing of any love of Milly's for him; only was sure that he had not
been in love with her, Mildred, when she first knew him; therefore had
not cared for her other personality. Who else was possible? With an
audible cry she sprang to her feet.

"Toovey! Archibald Toovey!"

The idea was monstrous, it was also grotesque; and even while she
plunged despairing fingers in her hair, she laughed so loud that she
might have been heard in the corridor.

"Mrs. Archibald Toovey! Good Heavens! But that girl was perfectly
capable of it."

Then she became more than serious and buried her face in her hands,
thinking.

"If it is Mr. Toovey," she thought, "I must go away at once, wherever I
am. I can't have been married long. I am sure to have some money
somewhere. I'll go to Tims. Oh, that brute! That idiot!"--she was
thinking of Milly--"How I should like to strangle her!"

She clinched her hands till the nails hurt h