tuation which was now so much
further complicated. When the unexpected and thrilling opportunity had
come to her the day after Christmas--the very day that was to
consummate her renunciation--the girl had been completely carried away
by it. She hadn't repudiated the decision she had come to so
painfully, she had simply disregarded it--ignored it utterly as if
there had been no such thing. And she had gone on ignoring it. In the
very first of it, the excitement of working directly for the stage had
rendered her oblivious of everything else. Then when certain faint
murmurings of conscience began to be audible, came the actual prospect
of the Merry Nickel to stifle them, and then there was the stage itself
and the actual footlights. Nevertheless, avoid the issue as she would,
more and more had her daylight hours come to be haunted with
misgivings, and now her heart was never light except in the evenings.
And combat any such direct thought as she might, she felt dimly that in
giving over her purpose to square her conduct with the right, she had
doubled and trebled the original wrong. Unvowing a vow must be
equivalent to signing a covenant with the powers of darkness. Now and
again lines from the poem Cousin Julia had repeated to her so
impressively that she could never forget it, came to her suddenly in
uncanny fashion. At such times, if questioned, Elsie would have
acknowledged that her Palladium had indeed fallen, with all the awful
consequences.

Lines from another and more familiar poem came to the girl the next day
as she sat in the afternoon with Miss Pritchard in their sitting-room,
the snow falling outside as if it were December. As she gazed at the
steadily falling, restful, soothing curtain of flakes which deadened
all sound and veiled all save its own beauty, unconsciously she was
repeating verses of a poem she had learned as a child. But as she came
to the words, "I thought of a mound in sweet Auburn," she recollected
herself. And somehow her mind turned instinctively to Miss Pritchard's
lover. It was because he, too, was dead, she supposed, and this snow
was rounding above his grave. But before she made the natural
application or drew the familiar comparison between his failure and her
own, Elsie clapped the lid down on her thoughts with a thud. Turning
resolutely to Miss Pritchard, she asked her, with strange intonation,
if she thought the snow would continue all night.

"I rather hope so," Mi