I expect that Scott and
Kathleen and I will have to take in boarders this winter; but if
nobody has any money, nobody can pay board, so everybody will be
ruined and I don't very much care, for I could teach school, only
who is to pay my salary if there's no money to pay it with? Oh,
dear! what nonsense I am writing--only to keep on writing, because
it seems to bring you a little nearer--my own--my Duane--my
comrade--the same, same little boy who ran away from his nurse and
came into our garden to fight my brother and--fall in love with his
sister! Oh, Fate! Oh, Destiny! Oh, Duane Mallett!

"Here is a curious phenomenon. Listen:

"Away from you I have a woman's courage to tell you how I long for
you, how my heart and my arms ache for you. But when I am with you
I'm less of a woman and more of a girl--a girl not yet accustomed to
some things--always guarded, always a little reticent, always
instinctively recoiling from the contact I really like, always a
little on the defensive against your lips, in spite of
myself--against your arms--where, somehow, I cannot seem to stay
long at a time--will not endure it--_cannot_, somehow.

"Yet, here, away from you, I so long for your embrace, and cannot
imagine it too long, too close, too tender to satisfy my need of
you.

"And this is my second letter to you within the hour--one hour after
your departure.

"Oh, Duane, I do truly miss you so! I go about humming that air you
found so quaint:

"'Lisetto quittee la plaine,
Moi perdi bonheur a moi,
Yeux a moi semblent fontaine,
Depuis moi pas mire toi,'

and there's a tear in every note of it, and I'm the most lonely
girl on the face of the earth to-day.

"GERALDINE QUI PLEURE."

"P.S.--Voici votre pipe, Monsieur!"

CHAPTER XIV

THE PROPHETS

August in town found an unusual number of New York men at the clubs, at
the restaurants, at the summer theatres. Men who very seldom shoved
their noses inside the metropolitan oven during the summer baking were
now to be met everywhere and anywhere within the financial district and
without. The sky-perched and magnificent down-town "clubs" were full of
men who under normal circumstances would have remained at Newport,
Lenox, Bar Harbor, or who at least would have spent the greater portion
of