exclamations, but he made no more articulate comment.

There was a seven-thirty train she thought she ought to take back to
town and as their walk had led in that direction they finished it at the
station, where he waited with her for the train to come in.

"It's been a good day," she said. "I feel as if you'd somehow pulled me
through."

"And I," he said, "feel like a wind-bag. I've talked and talked; smug
comfortable preaching."

"No, it's helped," she insisted. "Or something has. Just having you
there, perhaps. I feel better, anyway."

But after she'd got her last look at him on the platform, when the train
had carried her off, an observer, seeing the way the color faded out of
her face, and the look in the eyes, which, so wide open and so unseeing,
stared straight ahead, would have said that the benefit hadn't lasted
long. There was about her the look of somber terror, just verging on
panic, which you have seen in a child's face when he has been sent
up-stairs to bed alone in the dark.

Fragments of Galbraith's talk came back to her. It was by ceasing to be
her lover and her partner that he had become her friend. Rodney, it
seemed from his letters, was becoming her friend too. Was it because he,
too, had ceased to be her lover? if ever she stood face to face with him
again would she search in vain for that look of hunger--of ages-old
hunger and need--that she'd last seen when they stood face to face in
her little room on Clark Street?

She walked down-town to her apartment from the Pennsylvania station end,
though the natural effect of fatigue was to quicken her pace, and though
she was indubitably tired, she walked slowly; slowly, and still more
slowly. She found she dreaded going back to that apartment of hers and
shutting herself in for the night, alone.

She found two corners of white projecting from under her door. And when
she'd unlocked and opened it she stooped and picked them up, a visiting
card and a folded bit of paper. She turned the card over and gave a
little half-suffocated cry.

It was Rodney's card and on it he'd written, "Sorry to have missed you.
I'll come back at eight."

Her shaking fingers fumbled pitifully over the folds of the note, but
she got it open at last. It was from him too. It read:

"DEAR ROSE:

"This is hard luck. I suppose you're off for a week-end somewhere. I
want very much to see you. When you come back and have leisure for
me, will you call m