sent me word you had left home. I traced you."

"I don't see why you should trace me," she said, but not as if it
mattered.

"O, Laura!" he said again. "Well, I must say I don't think Mrs. Edmunds
was much of a friend!"

It was Mrs. Edmunds who had told Laura that there was this glimpse of
her husband in "The Cross of Diamonds." She had hesitated about telling
her, but had finally said it was so characteristic and beautiful a
moment she felt Laura should see it.

From the first Tom had opposed her seeing it, saying it would be nothing
but torture to her. Torture it was, but it was as if that torture were
all there was left of life.

Tonight everything was as a world of shadows. She knew that her brother
was taking her to his home instead of back to her own. He had wanted to
do this before, but she had refused. There was nothing in her now that
could refuse. She went with him as if she were merely moving in a
picture and had no power of her own to get out of it.

And that was the way it was through the next few weeks. Tom and his wife
would talk to her about trying to interest herself in life. She made no
resistance, she had no argument against this; but she had no power to do
it. They didn't know--they didn't know how it had been with her and
Howie.

She herself had never been outgoing. It was perhaps a habit of reserve
built out of timidity, but she had been a girl whose life did not have a
real contact with other lives. Perhaps there were many people like
that--perhaps not; she did not know. She only knew that before Howie
came the life in her was more as a thing unto itself than a part of the
life of the world.

Then Howie came! Howie, who could get on with any one, who found
something to like in every one; and in the warmth and strength of his
feeling for people he drew her into that main body of life where she had
not been before. It had been like coming into the sunshine!

Now he was gone; and they asked her to be alone what she had been
through him. It was like telling one to go into the sunshine when the
sun is not shining.

And the more these others tried to reach her, the more alone she felt,
for it only made her know they could not reach her. When you have lived
in the sunshine, days of cold mist may become more than you can bear.
After a long struggle not to do so, she again went to the long-distance
telephone to find out where that picture was being shown--that picture
into which was caught on