patchwork, and drew out the faithful Moonstone from under her elbow.

"Someone'll come soon," she assured herself, and slipped into the
story as a hot swimmer slips off his sunny rock into the waiting
blue. Another world, a delicious, smooth element--Romance
itself--received her, and of hunger and heat, thirst and the fatigue
of the road, she knew no more than the blessed dead themselves....

A sharp tap at the farther door disturbed her, and instinctively she
called, "Come in!"

A swift, swishing step brushed across the bedroom and a slender,
angry-eyed young woman poised like a gull before her.

"Can I get something to eat here?"

Her voice was at once imperious, irritated, unsure of itself. It
could not be that the owner of this voice, dressed with that
insolent simplicity that need not consider the costly patience of
the work-women, ringed like a dowager with great audacious squares
of ruby and white diamond, booted and hatted as one who wears and
throws away, with a bag of golden mesh on her wrist to pay the
price of any whim--it could not be that she doubted what answer she
should receive. And yet she did--did, and had before this: so much
was evident at first sight. She was a curious gypsyish type, for all
her _Rue de la Paix_ curvings and slim, inevitable folds and pleats;
a full, drooping mouth in a slender dark face, great brown eyes and
heavy waves of black hair. She looked discontented and ready to make
some one suffer for it.

"Well--can I?" she repeated, as Caroline stared. "I'm ready to pay,
of course."

"I don't know--I don't live here," said Caroline shortly. She felt
untidy and badly dressed beside this graceful thing standing in a
faint cloud of subtle perfume of her own; her sleeves were too short
and her heavy shoes knobby and worn. She wanted furiously to smell
sweet like that; and the golden bag--oh, to feel it, powerful and
careless, on her wrist!

"Can you find out?" said the girl, eyeing the room attentively; "my
car broke down--the man left it in the road and went to Ogdenville
for gasoline. I've got to rest somewhere."

"I don't know anything about it," Caroline said coldly. "I'm waiting
for someone to come, myself. There's nobody here. I don't live here
at all."

With that, and because she was embarrassed and cross and hungry, she
opened her book ostentatiously and affected to read busily. The girl
frowned angrily a moment, then gave a foreign little shrug of her
shoulder and