the East Side where
the strident grind of the elevated was never silent, and in a small and
very bare room the girl took off her hat and coat. She was one of the
least important of the women who conducted the affairs of this mission
school. Its assembly rooms, _creches_ and diet kitchens constituted her
present world.

They had said that there was nothing she could do--a society girl with a
drawing room and hunting field equipment--and only the All-seeing and
herself knew how near true it had proven.

All these years, she reflected with a smile of self-derision, she had
harboured the thought of this mountain girl, caricatured by imagination
into a bare-foot sloven, before whose vulgar charms Boone's loyalty had
discreditably wavered. Now she had seen that girl and the dimensions of
her own injustice loomed in exaggeration before her self-accusation.

For a long while Anne Masters sat there in her bare room. Often she had
wondered whether she could go on enduring the strain of a life that had
emptied out all its fulness and become pinched and aching. It seemed to
her that now she stood as one having touched the depths and the fine
quality of her courage was not far from disintegration.

A great and hungry impulse filled her. She wanted to talk to Happy
Spradling--to talk to her under an assumed name--and to lay to the
bruises about her heart the solace of hearing something of those hills
she had once loved so intensely--something of the man who was now a
member of the Foreign Relations Committee of Congress! The wish grew
into an obsession and when, toward daylight, sleep came fitfully, it
wove itself into the troubled pattern of her dreams.

There were many reasons why she should repress that desire. If Happy
learned who she was, the secret of her hiding would be penetrated, and
she would show herself as conquered.

Yet the next day when the time came that gave her leisure from her
duties she went again, invincibly drawn, to the University Club in the
Forties.

Opposite the door, and across the street, she paused, holding herself
hard in hand against a tidal sweeping of emotions, and as she stood
there she saw the door open and Mrs. Ariton come out, followed by Happy.
The two crossed the sidewalk to the curb and stepped into the great
lady's limousine.

Anne still hesitated, then she shook her head and turned resolutely
away. The car rolled forward and rounded a corner, and the one possible
association with a