low passengers with keenest interest, watched the pictures
that framed themselves in the car window, and delighted in a locomotion
that proceeded from no effort of her own. It was not often that she was
granted the luxury of sitting still.

They reached Ashbury amid a clamor of noontide whistles, and took a cab to
the hospital. Here the nurse met them.

"Miss Webster has had her arm set and is resting comfortably," announced
the woman. "There is not the slightest cause for alarm. We telephoned
merely because she was fretting and becoming feverish, and the doctor
feared she would not sleep. The loss of her purse and bank books worried
her. We found your address in her coat pocket. She was too dazed and
confused to tell who her friends were."

"Is she expectin' us?" inquired Jane.

"No," the nurse answered. "The doctor decided not to tell her, after all,
that we had telephoned. For some reason she seemed unwilling for people to
know where she was. To be frank, we rather regretted calling you up, when
we discovered how she felt about it. But the mischief was done then----"

"It warn't no mischief," Jane put in with a smile. "It was the best thing
that could 'a' happened."

"I'm glad of that."

"Could I see her, do you think?" demanded the visitor presently.

"Yes, indeed. She is much better this morning. Perhaps, however, one
caller at a time will be enough; she still has some fever."

"Of course."

Jane turned to Martin; but he shook his head.

"You go," he said.

"I'll do whatever you want me to."

"I'd rather you went first."

"Just as you say. I won't stay long though."

After watching the two women disappear down the long, rubber-carpeted
corridor, he began to pace the small, spotlessly neat office in which he
had been asked to wait. It was a prim, barren room, heavy with the fumes
of iodoform and ether. At intervals, the muffled tread of a doctor or
nurse passing through the hall broke its stillness, but otherwise there
was not a sound within its walls.

Martin walked back and forth until his solitude became intolerable. There
were magazines on the table but he could not read. Would Jane never
return? The moments seemed hours.

In his suspense he fell to every sort of pessimistic imagining. Suppose
Lucy were worse? Suppose she declined to see him? Suppose she did not love
him?

So sanguine had been his hopes, he had not seriously considered the latter
possibility. The more he meditated on the t