d so easy and smooth-sailing. Even Martin
had changed into a different man, and was ordering her about. If he
thought he could drive her back to that prison again, he was
considerably wrong. She would never go back, never.

The car was running slowly. "Have you any other friends in town?" asked
Martin, who seemed to be trying to hide an odd kind of excitement.

"No," said Joan. "Alice is my only friend here. Drive to some place
where I can call up Gilbert Palgrave and explain the whole thing. What
does it matter about my being alone? If I don't mind, who should?
Please do as I say. There's no other place for me to go to, and wild
horses sha'n't drag me back."

"You sha'n't go back," said Martin. He turned the car up Madison Avenue
and drove without another word to East Sixty-seventh Street and stopped
in front of a small house that was sandwiched between a mansion and a
twelve-story apartment-house. "This is mine," he said simply. "Will you
come in?"

A smile of huge relief came into Joan's eyes. "Why worry?" she said.
"How foolish of us not to have thought of this before!"

But there was no smile on Martin's face. His eyes were amazingly bright
and his mouth set firmly. His chin looked squarer than ever. Once more
he carried out the suit-case, put a latchkey into the lock and threw
back the door. Joan went in and stood looking about the cheery hall
with its old oak, and sporting prints, white wood and red carpet. "Oh,
but this is perfectly charming, Marty," she cried out. "Why did we
bother our heads about Alice when there is this haven of refuge?"

Martin marched up to her and stood eye to eye. "Because I'm alone," he
said, "and you're a girl. That's why."

Joan made a face. "I see. The conventions again. Isn't there any sort
of woman here?"

"Yes, the cook."

She laughed. There was a comic side to this tragedy, after all, it
seemed. "Well, perhaps she'll give us some scrambled eggs and coffee. I
could eat a horse."

Martin opened the door of the sitting room. Like the one in which she
had slept so soundly the previous night, it was stamped with the
character and personality of the other Martin Gray. Books, warm and
friendly, lined the walls. Mounted on wood, fish of different sizes and
breeds hung above the cases, and over the fireplace there was a
full-length oil painting of a man in a red coat and riding breeches.
His kind eyes greeted Joan.

For several minutes she stood beneath it, smiling back. The