tern, cold, unforgiving, worse still, disgusted. She realized as she
had never realized before that Harry was what counted most, Harry was
the one thing she could not live without. To the terrors of these
hours was added the terror of losing him.

She burst into wild sobs.

"I want Harry, I don't want anything in the world but Harry! Oh, take
me home, please take me home!"

Burgess got a taxi and went with her to the hotel, where She was put to
bed, a doctor sent for, and where at last she fell asleep.

But it was not until noon the next day that she was able to take the
train for New York. And then began, two hours and a half that Pauline
remembered to the last hour of her life. Her photograph stared at her
from the front page of every daily paper--even the glasses and thick
veil she wore to conceal her identity could not soften the conspicuous
pictures. Newsboys called her name, and the gorilla story, Wrentz, and
Blount's names, together--every passenger in the car, it seemed to
her, men, women, and children, were discussing her. There were silly
jokes, contemptuous criticism, half-laughing suggestions that there was
something "queer about Miss Marvin." just behind her, she heard one
woman say to another, "But, then, my dear, what could you expect of any
girl whose mother was an Egyptian" as if this equaled breaking the
whole Decalogue.

Though she had wired Owen, the motor did not meet her, and feeling more
than ever forlorn and forsaken, Pauline got into a taxi. Never had the
old place looked so beautiful as today when she felt that it could
never be her home again--she must tell Harry that her mother was an
Egyptian and then even if he could forgive her this last adventure he
would never marry her. Oh, how could she have been so silly, so
conceited, so cruel to Harry! And what a fool she had been to go in
search of experience in order to write. If she couldn't write with all
this beauty spread out before her, if she couldn't write by living a
real, human, everyday life, the sort of life that brings you close to
normal people, how could she ever hope to write by living on excitement
--on abnormal excitement and with abnormal people and situations?

She paid the driver and was walking slowly up the steps of the veranda,
when, suddenly, she halted as if she had been struck. What was that?
It couldn't be--yes, it was--funeral streamers hanging from the
door-knob!

With a scream that rang through the