vely into hers.

"You're right," she said. "There's no use waiting. I'm sorry. I
can't."

Something faded from his face. He looked at her fixedly for a moment
and then rose to his feet. "I wonder if you've fooled yourself as
thoroughly as you have me," he said.

She made no reply, though she cringed slightly at the inference, and
sat there watching him.

He lifted his shoulders and let them sink heavily, and then he cast a
look about the deserted lobby. Then he turned to her again and
imperceptibly inclined his head. He did not offer his hand.

"Good-bye," he said.

"Good-bye," she echoed, her lips barely moving.

She watched his broad, stolid back move slowly across the room, saw
him pause for a moment at the door and then plunge resolutely through
it, and then she was alone. Not a sound came to her ears. The desk by
the switchboard was deserted. A bracket lamp on the wall opposite was
crooked; one of the crystal pendants beneath it was broken short off.
Someone had dropped a burnt match on the floor in front of the desk
and it lay there in mute sacrilege. All at once the silence seemed
fraught with a tumult of hateful suggestions, and, without ringing for
the elevator, she sprang to her feet, rushed for the steps, and fled
up to her room.

She switched on the light and stood for a moment by the table
fingering an ivory paper cutter. Then she went to the window and
peered out. Not a sound came to her, not a single, friendly sound.
Below her the leafy branches stretched out, inert, indifferent; and
below them, darkness.

"And this is the man," she thought, "from whom I have borrowed all
that money."

PART III

BLOOMFIELD

CHAPTER XVII

Fate smiled. An itinerant Swiss became interested in the tea room.
There were a few days of sharp bargaining and on October the
fourteenth it was sold to him. The price just barely covered the
indebtedness. Mary Louise made haste to send Claybrook a check for the
fifteen hundred dollars plus the interest. Two days later she got the
notes through the mail with no comment and she tremblingly tore them
into bits and scattered the bits from her window. Then she went to the
bank and took up the note for the six hundred dollars she had
originally borrowed. It left her nothing, but she was free. She had
lived the summer and was where she had started. A little wan, feeling
a little empty, she caught the train for Bloomfield. All during the
trip she gazed from the