ing
that she had wished to become a singer, and being aware, too, of the
appointment for the next night at East Orange. Had she, then, changed
her purpose? Perhaps she was seeking both kinds of employment, meaning
to accept the one which came first. If the bookbinding won out that
might be dangerous to the rendezvous.

In any case, Fowle resolved to nip the project in the bud. He would go
later in the day to all the firms she had visited, ask if they had
engaged her, and, if so, drop a hint that she had been dismissed from
Brown's for being connected with the crime committed against Mr. Ronald
Tower. A bogus clergyman's word was good for something, anyhow.

From Twenty-third Street, where there was no work, Winifred made her way
to Twenty-ninth Street, followed still by the taxi. Here things turned
out better for her. She was seen by a manager who told her that they
would be short-handed in three or four days, and that, if she could
really produce a reference from Brown's he would engage her permanently.
Winifred left him her address, so that he might write and tell her when
she could come.

She lunched in a cheap restaurant and walked to her lodgings. Color
flooded her cheeks, but she was appalled by her loneliness, by the
emptiness of her life. To bind books and to live for binding books, that
was not living. She had peeped into Paradise, but the gate had been shut
in her face, and the bookbinding world seemed an intolerably flat and
stale rag-fair in comparison.

How was she to live it through, she asked herself. When she went up to
her room the once snug and homely place disgusted her. How was she to
live through the vast void of that afternoon alone in that apartment?
How bridge the vast void of to-morrow? The salt had lost its savor; she
tasted ashes; life was all sand of the desert; she would not see him any
more. The resolution which had carried her through the interview with
Carshaw failed her now, and she blamed herself for the murder of
herself.

"Oh, how could I have done such a thing!" she cried, bursting into
tears, with her hat still on and her head on the table.

She had to write a letter to the "agent," telling him that she did not
mean to keep the rendezvous at East Orange, since she had obtained other
work, and with difficulty summoned the requisite energy. Every effort
was nauseous to her. Her whole nature was absorbed in digesting her one
great calamity.

Next morning it was the same. Her a