k, and if
she casts me off, I can't stand it here any longer, and I
don't see how I can begin all over again, just when life was
seeming as if it might be worth while again.

So now, you see, V.V., why I wasn't prompter answering your
letter. I've tried to keep my courage up like you advised,
but it's too much for one man to carry. May you never know
the awful feeling that you're an outcast, not wanted
anywhere, is the wish of

Your unhappy friend, DAL.

P.S. How's father, do you ever see him these days? Don't let
him know any of this.

The girl looked through the rose-flowered curtains down into the sunny
street....

Dalhousie had long since become but a shadow and a name to Cally; she
had willed it so, and so it had been. Now, in his own poor scrawl, the
ghost of a lover too roughly discarded rose and walked again. And
beneath the cheap writing and the unrestrained self-pity, she seemed to
plumb for the first time the depths of the boy's present misery. The old
story, having struck him down once, had hunted him out and struck him
down again. Where now would he hide?...

The too reminiscent letter had come with the inopportunity of destiny. A
little more pressure and she was done for.

But this was mere mad folly. To shake it off at once, Cally began to
walk about her bedchamber. Nothing had really happened that had not been
true all along. She wished more than ever that it had all been started
differently, but it was too late to consider that now. She must think of
herself, and of Hugo and mamma. Dalhousie's friend had done his worst,
and she could still withstand it. Once in New York, once in Europe, and
all would be as it had been before....

Nevertheless, she was presently weak enough to open the letter again.
Now her eye fell upon two lines written in the margin at the top of the
first page, which she had missed before. They were in the writing of the
envelope, and read:

You can reach me at any time, day or night, through Meeghan's
Grocery--Jefferson 4127.

The words sprang up at her, and she stared back at them fascinated. The
man at the Dabney House was certain that she would tell now. He thought
the resolution might come on her suddenly, as in the night. Nominally,
he left it to her; yet at the same time he contrived to make her feel
caught in a trap, with no alternative, with this sense of enormous
pressure upon her. She remembered