ecessities, almost ludicrous in their
pettiness, forced her on.

As she came nearer she looked cautiously at the windows of the agency.
Who would be the first to note her home-coming? Would it be Miss
Douglass, or Esther Thielman, or Miss Bergyn, the superintendent nurse?
What would first be said to her? With what words would she respond? Then
how the news of the betrayal of her trust would flash from room to room!
How it would be discussed, how condemned, how deplored! Not one of the
nurses of that little band but would not feel herself hurt by what she
had done--by what she had been forced to do. And the news of her failure
would spread to all her acquaintances and friends throughout the City.
Dr. Street would know it; every physician to whom she had hitherto been
so welcome an aid would know it. In all the hospitals it would be a nine
days' gossip. Campbell would hear of it, and Hattie.

All at once, within thirty feet of the house, Lloyd turned about and
walked rapidly away from it. The movement was all but involuntary; every
instinct in her, every sense of shame, brusquely revolted. It was
stronger than she. A power, for the moment irresistible, dragged her
back from that doorway. Once entering here, she left all hope behind.
Yet the threshold must be crossed, yet the hope must be abandoned.

She felt that if she faced about now a second time she would indeed
attract attention. So, while her cheeks flamed hot at the meanness, the
miserable ridiculousness of the imposture, she assumed a brisk,
determined gait, as though she knew just where she were going, and,
turning out of the square down a by-street, walked around the block,
even stopping once or twice before a store, pretending an interest in
the display. It seemed to her that by now everybody in the streets must
have noted that there was something wrong with her. Twice as a passer-by
brushed past her she looked back to see if he was watching her. How to
live through the next ten minutes? If she were only in her room, bolted
in, locked and double-locked in. Why was there not some back way through
which she could creep to that seclusion?

And so it was that Lloyd came back to the house she had built, to the
little community she had so proudly organised, to the agency she had
founded, and with her own money endowed and supported.

At last she found herself at the bottom of the steps, her foot upon the
lowest one, her hand clasping the heavy bronze rail. There