em,
you'll let me know?"

She nodded. "Good-by," she said.

Rodney walked back to the railway station where he had checked his bag.
In two hours he was on a train bound back to Chicago.

Various things occurred to him during the journey eastward that he might
have said to Portia. He hadn't asked, for instance, whether Rose's
embargo on news of herself to him had been made effective also in the
other direction. Had she cut herself off from Portia's bulletins about
himself and the babies? Could Portia have transmitted a message from him
to Rose--the one Frederica had declined to take? But he felt in a way
rather glad that he hadn't asked any more questions, nor offered any
messages. He wasn't looking now for an intermediary between Rose and
himself. He wanted Rose, and he meant to find her. His whole mind, by
now, had crystallized into that hard-faceted, sharp-edged determination.
The sore masculine vanity that had kept him from appealing to the man
most likely to be able to help him was almost incredible now.

From the railway station in Chicago, the moment he got in, he telephoned
Jimmy Wallace at his newspaper office. It was then about half past four
in the afternoon. Jimmy couldn't leave for another hour, it seemed. It
was his afternoon at home to press agents, and he always gave them till
five-thirty to drop in. But he didn't think there were likely to be any
more to-day, and if Rodney would come over ...

Rodney got into a taxi and came, and found the critic at his shabby old
desk under a green-shaded electric light, in the midst of a vast
solitude, the editorial offices of an evening newspaper at that hour
being about the loneliest place in the world. There was a rusty look
about this particular local room, too, that made you wonder that any
real news ever could emanate from it. Yet only this afternoon they had
beaten the city in the announcement of the failure of the
Mortimore-Milligan string of banks.

"I've come," said Rodney, finding a sort of fierce satisfaction in
grasping the nettle as tightly as possible, "to see if you can tell me
anything about my wife."

Jimmy may have felt a bit flushed and flustered, but the fact didn't
show, and an imaginative insight he was in the habit of denying the
possession of led him to draw most of the sting out of the situation
with the first words he said.

"I'll tell you all I know, of course, but it isn't much. Because I
haven't had a word with her since the last