foot?
The girl wrung her hands, and there was no thought of the dramatic in
the gesture. Must her punishment be to keep on and on with her
wrong-doing, with the consciousness, increasingly more painful, of
deceiving Cousin Julia, of being, not only _not_ the person she
believed her to be, but exactly the sort of person she most despised?
Could that be her fate?

Looking ahead, Elsie said to herself she couldn't stand it--not now.
Before, she had had her uncomfortable moments; but since that talk with
Mr. Graham she had had no moment that wasn't agony. He had roused her
out of her dream of making things right by calling them so. And yet,
less than ever since that knowledge had come to her, was she ready to
hurt Cousin Julia, as confession or discovery would hurt her. Could it
be that it was impossible for her to straighten out her own conscience
without wounding the hearts of others? Was there no way whereby she
could make things right without involving Elsie Marley and Cousin Julia
in misery?

Staring wretchedly into the fire, the girl was unaware that she was
grappling with a big moral problem: that her personal perplexity was a
part of the old problem of evil: that what daunted her was the old
paradox that has confronted mankind since before the time of Job. She
understood dimly that the lines between good and ill do not converge
any more than unmoral geometrical parallels; but she still felt that it
must be possible to limit the consequences of wrong-doing to the
evil-doer so that the innocent should wholly escape.

But what, short of her own death, would bring that about? In that
event, indeed, Cousin Julia's natural grief would not be bitterly
painful; and Elsie Marley would simply go on as she was. But she
wasn't likely to die, and besides, wretched as she was, she didn't want
to. And even if she did, she wouldn't be so wicked or so cowardly as
to do anything to hasten her end.

But her consideration of that solution of her problem made way for
another. On a sudden a substitute solution presented itself to her
mind. Having gone so far, it was but natural that the girl's dramatic
instinct and her familiarity with romance and melodrama should suggest
something that would answer the purpose of death without occasioning
the same measure of pain--namely, her own disappearance. And the
suggestion no sooner appeared than it was accepted. Before Miss
Pritchard returned the idea was already so familiar a