life of self-accusation for herself--for Boone a tragedy.

She had assured herself with passionate reiteration that Boone was a
character in a chapter torn out of her life, but the heartache remained
in stubborn mutiny against that ordaining. It had been first gnawingly,
then fiercely, present while she laughed and talked at the table with an
effervescence no more natural than that pumped into artificially charged
wine, and she had needed no death's-head to sober her against too
abandoned a gaiety at that feast. Joe Gregory's words had, for all their
want of explicitness, been inescapably definite. They meant ruin--no
less--unless she intervened and came at once.

To go meant to stir tempests in teapots--to defy conventions, and
perhaps by a vapidly rigid interpretation, to compromise herself. To
refuse to go meant to abandon Boone to some undescribed, and therefore
doubly terrifying, disaster.

Anne Masters was not the woman to shrink from crises or from the
determined action for which crises called. Almost at once she knew that
she was going by the midnight train to the hills, and let the problems
that sprung from her going await a later solution. But how?

Going unaccompanied from a country-club dinner party to desperate
affairs brewing in the Cumberlands presented difficulties too tangible
to be dismissed. To confide in Colonel Tom or Morgan would mean only
that they would insist upon accompanying her. To confide in her mother
would mean burning up precious moments in hysteria. The one unobstructed
alternative appeared to be the unwelcome one of flight without
announcement.

But back to the table she carried little outward agitation. If her heart
pounded it was with a sort of exaltation born of impending moments of
action. If her face had paled it gave a logical basis for the plea of
violent headache upon which she persuaded Morgan to drive her home as
soon as the guests rose, and to make the necessary explanations only
after she had gone.

When Mrs. Masters returned she found a note entreating her not to give
way to undue anxiety. Anne was gone, and the hurriedly written lines
said she would telegraph tomorrow from her father's house, but that it
was not illness which had called her there.

* * * * *

In such a situation, provided one approach it in the mood of Alexander
toward the Gordian knot, the greater complexities appear in retrospect.

It was looking back on those pre