"To think, Pa, after all we've done for her!" sobbed Mrs. Monroe, and Lydia, wiping her nose and shaking her head, kept saying with reproachful firmness: "I can't believe it of Sally! Why shouldn't she tell one of us. To stand up and be married all alone!"

Her father took the news exactly as might have been expected. While there was hope of convicting Martie or Lydia of complicity, he questioned them sharply and sternly. When this was gone, he swiftly worked himself into such a passion as his children had rarely seen before. Sally and Joe were solemnly denounced, disinherited, and abandoned. And any child of his who spoke to either should share their fate.

"Oh, Papa—don't!" quavered Lydia, as her father strode to the Bible, and with horrible precision inked from the register the record of Sally's birth. Mrs. Monroe looked terrified, and even Leonard was pale. But Martie, to her own amazement, found a sudden calm scorn in her heart. What a silly thing to do, just because poor little Sally married the boy she loved. How dared Pa call himself a Christian while he regarded Sally's downward step from a mere social level a disgrace! And how cruel he was, playing upon poor Ma's and Lydia's feelings just for his own satisfaction.

"You understand me, don't you, Martie?" he asked grimly.

"I suppose so." An ugly smile curved Martie's lips. Her lids were half lowered.

"Well—remember it. And never any one of you mention your sister's name to me again!"

"No, Pa," said four fervent voices. Then they had dinner.

The next day the three women packed up Sally's things; Lydia and her mother in tears, but Martie strangely content. Something had happened at all events. She put Sally's baby sash and collar and other treasured rubbish in the package, with two scribbled lines pinned to them: "Praying for you, darling. Pa is furious. The slipper is for luck. Your M."

And then the eventless days began to wheel by again. Rose came home, and came to see Martie, and Martie dined at the Parkers'. Rodney, though obviously blind to all women but his wife, was cordial and gallant to the guest and Rose took her up to her pretty, frilly bedroom, so that Martie might take off her hat and coat, and told Martie that Rod was the neatest man she had ever seen, such a fusser about his bath and his clothes. On Rose's bureau was a big photograph of Rodney in a silver frame, and on Rodney's high dresser a charming photograph of Rose in her wedding gown. When she was putting on her hat four hours later to be driven home by Rodney, Martie heard Rose's wifely voice in the hall: "You are a darling to do this, Rod!" The tone was that in which a man is praised by his women for a hard duty cheerfully done. Martie was not surprised when Rose merrily confided to her that Rod wanted his wife to go along—the silly!—and accompanied them on the short drive.

She did not see much of the young Parkers after that, nor did she expect to be counted among their intimate friends. She began to drift into the public kindergarten in the mornings, to help Miss Malloy with the unruly babies. And she missed Sally more every day.

Sally and Joe had gone to Pittsville immediately after their wedding; Joe having received a dazzling offer of forty dollars a month for two summer months from the express company there.

But when Sally had been married six weeks, Martie heard her voice one day when the younger sister was passing the Hawkes's house. Instantly she entered the gate, her heart beating high. Sally's dear, unforgettable voice! And Sally's slender shoulders and soft, loose hair!

The girls were in each other's arms, laughing and crying as they clung together. Martie thought she had never seen her sister look so well, or seem so sweet and gay. There were a thousand questions on each side to ask; Martie poured out the home news. Sally and Joe were housekeeping in three rooms, and it was more FUN! And Sally really cooked him wonderful dinners; his father and mother had come over to one, and wasn't it good? Mrs. Hawkes enthusiastically agreed.

Of course, they had hardly ANYTHING, bubbled Sally, only two saucepans and one frying pan and the coffee pot. But it was more FUN! And in the evenings they walked around Pittsville, and went to the ten-cent theatre, or bought candy and divided it. COULDN'T Martie come some time to dinner?

"Pa," said Martie simply. Sally's bright face clouded. She sent a kiss to Ma and darling Lyd. She and Joe would come back to Monroe in September, and then she would come see Pa and make him forgive her. Tell him she still loved him!

Martie delivered none of these airy messages. She secretly marvelled at the happiness that could blind Sally to a memory of Pa, and Pa's stubbornness.

"Listen, Martie," said Sally, when for a moment the sisters were alone, "it wasn't so sudden as you think, my marrying Joe!" She stopped, interrupted by some thought, and added impulsively, "Isn't it STRANGE, Mart, that we might have missed each other; it makes us both just SHIVER to think of it! Well"—and with a visible effort the little wife brought herself down from a roseate cloud to realities again—"if—if Lyd had married Cliff Frost," she said uncertainly, "I never should have DARED marry Joe!"

"Or if I had married Rodney Parker, Sally?" Martie added steadily.

"Well—" The colour flew to Sally's face. "As it was," she went on a little hurriedly, "I just—couldn't bear to go on and on, it made me desperate! And I thought Pa and Ma's way is no good, our house never seems to have much happiness in it—and I'm going to get OUT! There never was a place like this for good times, and babies, and jokes, and company to dinner!" smiled Sally, looking about the Hawkeses' parlour triumphantly.

But then Sally was born devoid of a social sense, mused Martie, walking home. What would life be without it—she wondered. No affectations, no barriers, no pretenses—

"Flout me not, Sweet!" said some one at her side. She looked up into the beaming eyes of Wallace Bannister. "Don't you remember me—I'm the city feller that came here breakin' all hearts awhile back!"

"You idiot!" Martie laughed, too. "I thought you were miles away!"

"Well, judging by your expression, darling, you were miles away, too," said the irrepressible Wallace. "How are you, Brunhilde? Ich liebe dich! Yes'm, we ought to be miles away, but to tell you the honest truth, the season is simply ROTTEN here on the coast. We've bust up, for the moment, but dry those tears. Here's my contract for seven weeks in San Francisco—seven plays. Sixty bones per week; pretty neat, what? We begin rehearsing in July, open August eighth, and if it's a go, go on indefinitely. The Cluetts and I are in this—the rest of the company's gone flooey. Meanwhile, I have three weeks to wait, and I'm staying with my aunt in Pittsville studying like mad."

"And what are you doing in Monroe?" Martie said contentedly, as they wandered along.

"I came here a week ago to change some shoes," said Wallace, "and I saw you. So to-day I came and made you a formal call."

"You did NOT!" Martie ejaculated, laughing.

"Why didn't I? I fell down eleven steps into your garden, knocked on the front door, knocked on the side door, talked to some one called 'Ma,' talked to some one called 'Lydia,' and learned that Miss Martha Brunhilde Monroe was out for a sashay. There!"

"Well—for goodness sake!" Martie was conscious of flushing. From that second she grew a little self-conscious. He was a funny creature. He would have been unusually handsome, she thought, if it were not for a certain largeness—it was not quite coarseness—of feature. He would have been extraordinarily charming, decided Martie, but for that same quality in his manner; recklessness, carelessness. She knew he was not always telling the truth; these honours, these affairs, these fascinating escapades were not all his own. His exaggerated expressions of affection for herself were only a part of this ebullient sense of romance. But he was amusing.

"Bon soir, papillon!" he said at her gate. "How about a meet to-morrow? Tie a pink scarf to thy casement if thy jailer sleeps. Seriously, leave us meet, kid. Leave us go inter Bonestell's with the crowd—watto? I'll wait for youse outside the Library at three."

"With the accent on the WAIT," said Martie significantly. But she did not think of Rodney that evening. She thought of Sally and of Wallace Bannister.

Fortunately for her, it did not occur to her father to cross-examine her on any other event of the day except the circumstance that she had been seen walking with an unknown young man. This was food for much advice.

"I don't like it, my daughter," said Malcolm, rubbing his shins together and polishing his glasses as he sat by the fire. "I don't like it at all. I don't like this tendency to permit familiarities with this young man and that young man—all very well for a while, but not the sort of thing a young man chooses in a WIFE."

Martie, looking at him respectfully, as she placed a red Queen on a black King, felt in her heart that she would like to kill him.

The next afternoon she decided to clean the chicken house, one of the tasks in which her strange nature delighted. To splash about with hose and broom, tip over the littered drinking trough, wash cobwebs from the windows with a well-directed stream of water; in these things Martie found some inexplicable satisfaction. She went upstairs after luncheon to get into old clothes, came down half an hour later with her best hat on, walked straight out of the gate and down town.

Wallace was waiting, elated at her punctuality. Martie explaining her fear that some one might report their meeting to her father, they waited openly at Masset's corner, boarded the half-past three o'clock trolley, and went to Pittsville.

Pittsville was two miles away, but this adventure had all the charm of foreign travel to Martie. Every house interested her, the main street of the little town might have been Broadway in New York. The people looked different, she said. She and Wallace laughed their way through the Five-and-Ten-Cent Store, enjoyed a Floradora Special composed of bananas, ice cream, nuts, whipped cream, maple syrup, and cherries, and finally bought six cream puffs and carried them to Sally.

Sally's delight was almost tearful. She led Martie rapturously over her domain: the little bedroom spotless and sunshiny in the summer afternoon; the microscopic kitchen scented with the baked apples that HAD burned a little and the cookies that would NOT brown; the living-and-dining room that was at once so bare and so rich. It was a home, Martie realized dimly, and Sally was a person at last. The younger sister peeped interestedly into spice-tins and meat safe; three eggs were in a small yellow bowl, two thin slices of bacon on a plate. In the bread box was half a loaf of bread and one cut slice.

"Sally, it must be fun!" said Martie. "All this doll's house for six dollars a month!"

"Oh—fun!" Sally was rapturous beyond words. She gave them pale, hot cookies; the cream puffs would delight Joe.

The three laughed and feasted happily; Martie with a new sense of freedom and independence that exhilarated her like wine.

"Find us a nice little place like this, sister," said Wallace. "Martie loves me, Sarah. Their lips met in one long, rapturous kiss. The end."

The girls laughed joyously. Martie went home at five, Wallace accompanying her. She told her father that night that she had been in the Library.

The next day she did clean the chicken house, and did go down to spend the afternoon with Miss Fanny. But freedom danced in her veins; on the third afternoon she and Wallace took a long walk, and stopped to see Dr. Ben, and, sitting on two barrels behind the old railway station, ate countless cherries and apricots. Again—and again—they went to Pittsville. Sally was in their confidence and feasted them in the little flat or went with them on their innocent expeditions.

From their third meeting, it was cheerfully taken for granted that Wallace and Martie belonged to each other. Martie never knew what he really felt, any more than he dreamed of the girlish amusement and distrust in which she held him. They flirted only, but they swiftly found life uninteresting when apart. They never talked of marriage, yet every time they parted it was reluctantly, and never without definite plans for another immediate meeting. Wallace began to advise Martie not to eat the rich things that made her sick; Martie counselled him about his new suit, and listened, uneasy and ashamed, to a brief, penitential reference to "crazy" things he had done, as a "kid." He promised her never to drink again and incidentally told her that his real name was Edward Tenney. Suddenly they found the plural pronoun: we must do that; that doesn't interest us; Pa must not suspect our affair.

"The Cluetts are going to be in Pittsville," said Wallace one day. "I want you to meet them. You'll like Mabel; she's got two little kids. She and Jesse have been married only six years. And they'll like you, too; I've told 'em you're my girl!"

"Am I?" said Martie huskily. They were alone in Sally's little house, and for answer he put his arms about her. "Do you love me, Wallace?" she asked.

The question, the raised blue eyes, fired him to sudden passion. They kissed each other blindly, with shut eyes. After that, whenever they might, they kissed, and sometimes Martie, ignorant and innocent, wondered why the memory of his hot lips worried her a little.

There was nothing wrong in kissing! Martie still said to herself that of course they would not marry; yet when she was with Wallace she loved the evidences of her power over him, and seemed unable, as he was unable, to keep from the constant question: "Do you love me?"

In late June the Cluetts—pretty faded Mabel, her two enormous babies, her stepson Lloyd, and Jesse, the husband and father—all came to Pittsville for a few days' leisure before rehearsals began. Lloyd was a "light juvenile," off as well as on the stage. Jesse played father, judge, guardian, prime minister, and old family doctor in turn. Mabel, rouged and befrilled, still made an attractive foil for Wallace as the hero. Martie liked them all; their chatter of the fairyland of the stage, their trunks plastered with labels, their fine voices, their general air of being incompetent children adrift in a puzzling world. Deep laughter stirred within her when they spoke of business or of finance.

They talked frankly, in their three cheap rooms at the "Pittsville White House," before Wallace's girl. Jesse was pompous; Lloyd boyishly fretful; Mabel, patient, sympathetic, discouraged, and sanguine by turns. Martie was enraptured by the babies: Bernadette, a crimped heavy little brunette of five, and Leroy delicious at three months in limp little flannel wrappers.

"I'll tell you what, Miss Monroe—I'm going to call you Martha—" said Mabel, "I'm just about sick of California. I'm not a Californian; little old New York for mine. I first seen the light of day at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Sixteenth Street, and I wish to the good Lord I was there now. You'll never get a fair deal in Frisker, if any one should ride up on a bike and ask you, dear. We were doing very good last fall when little Mister Man here decided to join the party—after that I was simply no good! The box receipts have fell off steadily since we put that awful girl in. Don't leave that heavy child paralyze your limbs—she'll set there forever like an immidge, if you go on telling her stories!"

"I am amused—genuinely amused at the circumstances under which you find us, Miss Monroe," said Jesse Cluett with a dignified laugh. "And my friends in the East would be equally surprised. Professional pride brought me West, the pride of a man whose public demands one or two favoured parts from him, year after year. My three or four successes were a great gratification to me; not only the public, but my fellow actors at the Lambs, assured me that my future was MADE. 'Made?—no,' I said. 'No. I have no wish to become a one-part man.' To John Drew I said—I met him going into the Club-'H'ar you, Jesse?' he said. ... Oh, yes; we are warm friends, old friends. I played for two years with John Drew. Very brilliant actor—in some ways. And that is only one instance of the enthusiastic appreciation to which I am accustomed. ... Are we going to eat, my dear?" For Mrs. Cluett, who in her hospitable enthusiasm over Martie had taken a little spirit lamp from the washstand and placed a full kettle over the flame, was now looking about her in a vague, distressed sort of way.

"It's going out," said she blankly. Philosophically, Jesse put his wide-brimmed hat over his loose curls and, straightening his shoulders, walked mincingly out for alcohol with the younger men. Mrs. Cluett spread a small, spotted fringed cloth on a trunk, setting on it a cut and odorous lemon a trifle past its prime and a sticky jar of jam. Martie continued to cuddle Leroy and tell Bernadette a fairy tale. She found the crowded, tawdry bedroom delightfully cosy, especially when the men came back with graham crackers and cheese and spongy, greasy bakery doughnuts.

They all laughed when Wallace asked for the rat-trap's delight; and when Lloyd dropped a cruller on the floor and thumped his heel to show its weight; and when Wallace said: "Don't jam or jar Miss Monroe, Jesse!" But when, in retort for this latest witticism, Martie said: "Put your hand where it hurts, Wallace, and show Mama"; the laughter changed to actual shrieks of mirth; Jesse indulging in a deep "ha-ha-ha!" and Mabel hammering her heels madly together and sobbing put faintly that she should die—she should simply DIE!

Martie almost missed the five o'clock trolley, but Wallace pushed her upon the moving platform at the last possible moment, and she laughed and gasped blindly half the way home, accepting his help with her disordered hair and hat. When she finally raised her face, and somewhat shamefacedly eyed the one or two other occupants of the car, she saw Rose sitting opposite, a neat and interested Rose in her trousseau tailor-made.

Uncomfortable, Martie bowed, and Rose responded sweetly, presently patting the seat beside her with an inviting glove. Somewhat surprised at this unexpected graciousness, Martie and her escort crossed the car.

"No, MRS.—not Miss!" Rose contradicted Wallace merrily, looking up at him prettily. "I know I'm not very imposing, but I'm a really truly old married lady!"

"This is Mrs. Rodney Parker, Wallace," Martie said. Instantly she was pleasantly conscious that her easy use of this actor's name was a surprise to Rose, and for the first time a definite pride in possession seized her. He might not be perfection, but he was hers.

"Is that so!" Wallace exclaimed, with new interest in eyes and voice. "Gosh—what fun we had that night! Do you remember the night we had oysters, and sat in that little place gassing for two hours? You know," said he, in a confidential aside to Rose, "Martie's a wonder when she gets started!"

"Isn't she?" Rose responded politely. "That was before I met my husband, I think," she added, "or rather re-met him, for years ago Mr. Parker and I——"

But Wallace, amused by the discussion that had arisen between the conductor and a Chinese who was getting on the car, interrupted abruptly to call Martie's attention to the affair, and Rose's reminiscence was lost. She said, with her good-byes, that Mr. Bannister must come and dine with them.

"Gosh, I see myself!" ejaculated Wallace ungratefully, as he walked with Martie to the gate. "I never could stand that ass Parker!"

"Don't you think she's very pretty, Wallace?"

"Oh, I don't know! I don't care much for those dolly women. I like red hair and big women, myself. Listen, Martie. To-morrow——"

No more was said of Rose. Martie wondered why she liked to hear Rodney Parker called an ass.

Malcolm Monroe came home for luncheon every day except Wednesday, which made Wednesday for the women of the family the easy day of the week. Their midday meal, never elaborate or formal, was less formal and even simpler on this day; conversation was more free, and time less considered.

For several days after Sally's extraordinary marriage Mrs. Monroe had wept continually, and even her always mild and infrequent attempts at conversation had been silenced. Later, she and Lydia had long and mournful discussions of the event, punctuating them with heavy sighs and uncomprehending shaking of their heads. That a Monroe in her senses could stoop to a Hawkes was a fact that would never cease to puzzle and amaze, and what the town was saying and thinking in the matter was an agonized speculation to Mrs. Monroe and Lydia. "Socially, of course," said Lydia, "we will never hold up our heads again!"

But as the days went by and the divorce of the young Mulkeys, and the new baby at Mrs. Hughie Wilson's, and the Annual Strawberry Festival and Bazaar for the Church Debt came along to make the gossip about Sally and Joe of secondary interest, Sally's mother and sister revived. They came to take a bitter-sweet satisfaction in the sympathy and interest that were shown on all sides.

Martie was not often at home in these days. "She fairly lives at the Library, and she takes long walks, I imagine, Ma," Lydia said once. "You know Martie misses—she's lonely. And then—there was, of course, the feeling about Rodney. It's just Martie's queer way of righting herself."

But on the hot Wednesday morning that brought in July Martie, with a clear conscience, was baking gingerbread. She had improved in manner and habit, of late, displaying an unwonted interest in the care of herself and her person, and an unwonted energy in discharging domestic duties.

She was buttering pans vigorously, and singing "The Two Grenadiers," when Lydia came into the kitchen.

"Martie, Pa just came in the gate. Isn't that maddening! We'll have to give him something canned; he hates eggs. Can't you make some drop cakes of that batter so they'll be done?"

"Sure I can!" Martie snatched a piece of paper to butter. "But what brings him home?"

"Why, I haven't the faintest——" Lydia was beginning, when her father's voice came in a shout from the dining room:

"Martie—Martie—MARTIE!"

Terror seized Martie, her mouth watered saltly, her knees touched, and a chill shook her. The hot day turned bleak. She and Lydia exchanged a sick look before Martie, trembling, crossed the pantry, littered by Lydia's silver polish and rags, and went in to face the furious old man on the hearthrug. Malcolm was quivering so violently that his own fear seemed to be that he would lose his voice before he had gained his information. Martie was vaguely conscious that her mother, frightened and pale, was in the room, and that Len had come to the hall doorway.

"Martie," said her father, breathing hard, "where were you yesterday afternoon?"

"At Alice Clark's Five Hundred with Lyd——" the girl was beginning innocently. He cut her short with an impatient shake of the head.

"I don't mean yesterday! Where were you on Monday?"

"Monday? Why, Mama and I walked down to Bonestell's."

"Yes, we did, Pa! Yes, we did!" quavered Mrs. Monroe. "Oh, Pa, WHAT IS IT?"

"And then what did you do?" he pursued blackly, turning to his wife.

"Why—why, Martie said she was going to go over to Pittsville and back, just for the ride—just to stay on the trolley, Pa!" explained his wife.

"Martie," thundered her father, "when you went to Pittsville you saw your sister, didn't you?"

Martie's head was held erect. She was badly frightened, but conscious through all her fear that there was a certain satisfaction in having the blow fall at last.

"Yes, sir," she gulped; she wet her lips. "Yes, sir," she said again.

"You admit it?" said Malcolm, his eyes narrowing.

Lydia, pale and terrified, had come in from the kitchen. Now she suddenly spoke.

"Oh, Pa, don't—don't blame Martie for that! You know what the girls always were to each other—I don't mean to be impertinent, Pa—do forgive me!—but Martie and Sally always——"

"One moment, Lydia," said her father, with a repressive gesture, the veins blue on his forehead. "JUST—ONE—MOMENT." And, panting, he turned again to Martie. "Yes, and who else did you see in Pittsville?" he whispered, his voice failing.

Martie, breathing fast, her bright eyes fixed upon him with a sort of fascination, did not answer.

"I'll tell you who you saw," said Malcolm at white heat. "I'll tell you! You met this young whippersnapper Jackanapes—what's his name—this young one-night actor——"

"Do you mean Mr. Wallace Bannister?" Martis asked with a sort of frightened scorn.

Lydia and her mother gasped audibly in the silence. Malcolm moved his eyes slowly from his youngest daughter's face to his wife's, to Lydia's, and back to Martie again. For two dreadful moments he studied her, an ugly smile touching his harsh mouth.

"You don't deny it," he said, after the interval, in a shaking voice. "You don't deny that you've been disobeying me and lying to me for weeks? Now I tell you, my girl—there's been enough of this sort of thing going on in this family. You couldn't get the man you wanted, so, like your sister, you pick up——"

Martie laughed briefly and bitterly. The sound seemed to madden him. For a moment he watched her, his head dropped forward like a menacing animal.

"Understand me, Martie," he said. "I'll break that spirit in you—if it takes the rest of my life! You'll laugh in a different way! My God—am I to be the laughing-stock of this entire town? Is a girl your age to——"

"Pa!" sobbed Mrs. Monroe. "Do what you think best, but don't—DON'T excite yourself so!"

Her clutching fingers on his arm seemed to soothe in through all his fury. He fell silent, still panting, and eying Martie belligerently.

"You—go to your room!" he commanded, pointing a shaking finger at her. "Go upstairs with your sister, Lydia, and bring me the key of her door. When I decide upon the measure that will bring this young lady quickest to her senses, I'll let her know. Meanwhile——"

"Oh, Pa, you needn't lock Martie in," quivered Lydia, "she'll stay—won't you, Martie?"

Martie, like a young animal at bay, stood facing them all for a breathless moment. In that time the child that had been in her, through all these years of slow development, died. Anger went out of her eyes, and an infinite sadness filled them. A quick tremble of her lips and a flutter at her nostrils were the only signs she gave of the tears she felt rising. She flung one arm about her mother and kissed the wet, faded cheek.

"Good-bye, Ma," she said quickly. In another instant she had crossed to the entrance hall, blindly snatched an old soft felt hat from the rack, caught up Len's overcoat, and slipped into it, and was gone. Born in that moment of unreasoning terror, her free soul went with her.

The streets were flooded with hot summer sunshine, the sky almost white. Not a breeze stirred the thick foliage of the elm trees on Main Street as Martie walked quickly down to the Bank.

It was Rodney Parker who gave her her money; the original seventeen dollars and fifty cents had swelled to almost twenty-two dollars now. Martie hardly saw the gallant youth who congratulated her upon her becoming gipsy hat; mechanically she slipped her money into a pocket, mechanically started for the road to Pittsville.

Five minutes later she boarded the half-past twelve o'clock trolley, coming in excited and exultant upon Sally who was singing quietly over a solitary luncheon. The girls laughed and cried together.

"The funny thing is, I am as free as air!" Martie exclaimed, her cheeks glowing from the tea and the sympathy and the warm room. "But I never knew it! If Pa had gotten on that trolley, I think I would have fainted with shock. But what could he do? I am absolutely FREE, Sally—with twenty-one dollars and eighty-one cents!"

"I wish you had a husband——" mused Sally.

"I'd rather have a job," Martie said with a quick, bright flush nevertheless. "But I think I know how to get one. Mrs. Cluett is going to be playing steadily now, and after this engagement they're going to try very hard to get booked in New York. She's got to have SOME ONE to look out for the children."

"But Martie——" Sally said timidly, "you'd only be a sort of servant——"

"Well, that's the only thing I know anything about," Martie answered simply. "It might lead to something——"

"Then you and Wallace aren't——?" Sally faltered. "There's nothing serious——?"

Martie could not control the colour that swept up to the white parting of her hair, but her mouth showed new firmness as she answered gravely:

"Sally—I don't know. Of course, I like him—how could I help it? We're awfully good chums; he's the best chum I ever had. But he never—well, he never asked me. Sally"—Martie rested her elbows on the table, and her chin on her hands—"Sally, would you marry him?"

"If I loved him I would," said Sally.

"Yes, but did you KNOW you loved Joe?" Martie asked. Sally was silent.

"Well—not so much—before—as after we were married," she said hesitatingly, after a pause.

Martie suddenly sprang up.

"Well, I'm going to see Mrs. Cluett!"

"I'll go, too," said Sally, "and we'll stop at the express office and tell Joe!"

Mrs. Cluett was alone with her children when the callers went in, and even Martie's sensitive heart could have asked no warmer reception of her plan.

The little actress kissed Sally, and kissed Martie more than once, brimming over with interest and sympathy.

"Dearie, it ain't much of a start for you, but it is a start!" said Mabel warmly over the head of the nursing baby. "And you'll get your living and your railroad fares out of it, anyway! It'll be an ackshal godsend to Mr. Cluett and me, for the children have took to you something very unusual. We'll have elegant times going around together, and you'll never be sorry."

These cheering sentiments Jesse echoed when he came in with Lloyd a few minutes later.

"Much depends upon our future contracts, Miss Monroe," said he, "but I will go so far as to say this. Should you some time desire to try the calling that Shakespeare honoured, the opportunity will not be lacking!"

This threw Sally, Martie, and Mabel into transports. It now being after three o'clock tea was proposed.

And now Martie busied herself happily as one belonging to the little establishment. Sally had taken rapturous possession of Leroy. Mabel lighted the alcohol lamp. Martie, delayed by the affectionate Bernadette, shook out the spotted cloth, and cut the stale cake.

They were all absorbed and chattering when Wallace Bannister opened the door. At sight of him Martie straightened up, the long knife in one hand, Bernadette's sticky little fingers clinging to the other. The news was flung at him excitedly. Martie had left home—she was never going back—she had only twenty dollars and an old coat and hat—she was going to stay with Mabel for the present——

"What's this sweet dream about staying with Mabel?" Wallace said, bewildered, reproachful, definite. He came over to Martie and put one arm about her. "Look here, folks," he said, almost indignantly, "Martie's my girl, aren't you, Martie? We're going to be married right now, this afternoon; and hereafter what I do, she does—and where I go, she goes!"

The love in his eyes, the love in all their watching faces, Martie never forgot. Like a great river of warmth and sunshine it lifted her free of her dry, thirsty girlhood; she felt the tears of joy pressing against her eyes. There was nothing critical, nothing calculating, nothing repressing here; her lover wanted her, just as she stood, penniless, homeless, without a dress except the blue gingham she wore!

The glory of it lighted with magic that day and the days to come. They laughed over the pretty gipsy hat, over Len's coat, over the need of borrowing Mabel's brush and comb. With Joe and Sally, they all dined together, and wandered about the village streets in the summer moonlight; then Martie went to bed, too happy and excited to sleep, in Bernadette's room, wearing a much-trimmed nightgown of Mabel's. It had been decided that the marriage should take place in San Francisco, Wallace sensibly suggesting that there would be less embarrassing questioning there, and also that Martie's money might be spent to better advantage in the city.

Martie's trunk came to Sally's house the next morning, unaccompanied by message or note, and three days later Martie wrote her mother a long letter from a theatrical boarding-house in Geary Street, sending a copy of the marriage certificate of Martha Salisbury Monroe to Edward Vincent Tenney in Saint Patrick's Church, San Francisco, and observing with a touch of pride that "my husband" was now rehearsing for an engagement of seven weeks at sixty dollars a week. There was no answer.



BOOK II

CHAPTER I

For days it was her one triumphant thought. She was married! She was splendidly and unexpectedly a wife. And her life partner was no mere Monroe youth, and her home was not merely one of the old, familiar Monroe cottages. She was the wife of a rising actor, and she lived in the biggest city of the State!

Martie exulted innocently and in secret. She reviewed the simple fact again and again. The two Monroe girls were married. A dimple would deepen in her cheek, a slow smile tug at her lips, when she thought of it. She told Wallace, in her simple childish way, that she had never really expected to be married; she thought that she would like to go back to Monroe for a visit, and let her old friends see the plain gold ring on her big, white hand.

Everything in Martie's life, up to this point, had helped her to believe that marriage was the final step in any woman's experience. A girl was admired, was desired, and was married, if she was, humanly speaking, a success. If she was not admired, if no one asked her in marriage, she was a failure. This was the only test.

Martie's thoughts never went on to the years that followed marriage, the experiences and lessons; these were all lost in the golden glow that surrounded the step safely accomplished. That the years between thirty and fifty are as long as the years between ten and thirty, never occurred to her. With the long, dull drag of her mother's life before her eyes, she never had thought that Rose's life, that Sally's life, as married women, could ever be long and dull. They were married—doubt and surmise and hope were over. Lydia and Miss Fanny were not married. Therefore, Rose and Sally and Martie had an obvious advantage over Lydia and Fanny.

It was a surprise to her to find life placidly proceeding here in this strange apartment in Geary Street, as if all the world had not stopped moving and commenced again. The persons she met called her "Mrs. Bannister" with no visible thrill. Nobody seemed surprised when she and the big actor quietly went into their room at night and shut the door.

She had fancied that the mere excitement of the new life filled all brides with a sort of proud complacency; that they felt superior to other human beings, and secretly scorned the unwed. It was astonishing to find herself still concerned with the tiny questions of yesterday: the ruffle torn on the bureau, the little infection that swelled and inflamed her chin, the quarter of a dollar her Chinese laundryman swore he had never received. It was always tremendously thrilling to have Wallace give her money: delightful gold pieces such as even her mother seldom handled. She felt a naive resentment that so many of them had to be spent for what she called "uninteresting" things: lodging and food and car fares. They seemed so more than sufficient, when she first touched them; they melted so mysteriously away. She felt that there should be great saving on so generous an allowance, but Wallace never saved, nor did any of his friends and associates.

So that a sense of being baffled began to puzzle her. She was married now; the great question of life had been answered in the affirmative. But—but the future was vague and unsettled still. Even married persons had their problems. Even the best of husbands sometimes left a tiny something to be desired.

Husbands, in Martie's dreams, were ideal persons who laughed indulgently at adored wives, produced money without question or stint, and for twenty or fifty years, as the span of their lives might decree, came home appreciatively to delicious dinners, escorted their wives proudly to dinner or theatre, made presents, paid compliments, and disposed of bills. That her mother had once perhaps had some such idea of her father did not occur to her.

"Lissen, dear, did I wake you up?" said Mrs. Wallace Bannister, coming quietly into the sitting room that connected her bedroom with that of Mrs. Jesse Cluett, in the early hours of an August morning.

"No—o! This feller wakes me up," Mrs. Cluett said, yawning and pale, but cheerful. She indicated the fat, serious baby in her arms. "Honest, it's enough to kill a girl, playing every night and Sunday, and trying to raise children!" she added, manipulating her flat breast with ringed fingers to meet the little mouth.

"I wish I could either have the baby nights, or play your parts!" laughed Martie, reaching lazily for manicure scissors and beginning to clip her nails, as she sat in a loose, blue kimono opposite the older woman.

"Dearie, you'll have your own soon enough!" Mabel answered gratefully. "It won't be so hard long. They get so's they can take care of themselves very quick. Look at Dette—goodness knows where she's been ever since she got up. She must of drunk her milk and eaten her san'wich, because here's the empty glass. She's playing somewhere; she's all right."

"Oh, sure—she's all right!" Martie said, smiling lazily. And as Leroy finished his meal she put out her arms. "Come to Aunt Martie, Baby. Oh, you—cunnin'—little—scrap, you!"

"You'd ought to have one, Mart," said Mabel affectionately.

The wife of a month flushed brightly. With her loosened bronze braid hanging over her shoulder, her blue eyes soft with happiness, and her full figure only slightly disguised by the thin nightgown and wrapper she wore, she looked the incarnation of potent youth and beauty.

"I'd love it," she said, burying her hot cheeks in the little space between Leroy's fluffy crown and the collar of his soggy little double gown.

"I love 'em, too," Mabel agreed. "But they cert'ny do tie you down. Dette was the same way—only I sort of forgot it."

"If this salary was going to keep up, I'd like a dozen of 'em!" Martie smiled.

"Well, Wallace ought to do well," Mabel conceded. "But of course, you can't be sure. My idea is to plunge in and HAVE them, regardless. Things'll fit if they've GOT to."

"That's the NICEST way," Martie said timidly. She had married, knowing nothing of wifehood and motherhood, except the one fact that the matter of children must be left entirely to chance. But she did not like to tell Mabel so.

She sat on in the pleasant morning sunshine, utterly happy, utterly at ease. The baby went to sleep as the two women murmured together. Outside the lace-curtained windows busy Geary Street had long been astir. Wagons rattled up and down; cable-cars clanged. Sunlight had already conquered the summer fog. It was nine o'clock.

Mabel was enjoying tea and toast, but Martie refused to join her. If every hour had not been so blissful the young wife would have said that the happiest time of the day was when she and Wallace wandered out into the sunshine together for breakfast.

Presently she slipped away to take the bath that was a part of her morning routine now, and to wake Wallace. With his tumbled hair, his flushed face and his pale blue pajama jacket open at the throat Martie thought him no more than a delightful, drowsy boy. She sat on the edge of the bed beside him, teasing him to open his eyes.

"Ah—you darling!" Wallace was not too sleepy to appreciate her cool, fresh kisses. "Oh, Lord, I'm a wreck! What time is it?"

"Nearly ten. You've had ten hours' sleep, darling. I don't know what you WANT!" Martie answered—at the bureau now, with the glory of her hair falling about her.

While they dressed they talked; delicious irrelevant chatter punctuated with laughter and kisses. The new stock company was a success, and Wallace working hard and happily. At ten the young Bannisters went forth in search of breakfast, the best meal of the day.

Martie loved the city: Market Street, Kearney Street, Union Square. She loved the fresh breath of the morning in her face. She always had her choice of flowers at the curb market about Lotta's fountain, pinning a nodding bunch of roses, Shasta daisies, pansies, or carnations at the belt of her white shirtwaists. They went to the Vienna Bakery or to Swain's for their leisurely meal, unless Wallace was hungry enough to beg for the Poodle Dog, or they felt rich enough for the Palace. Now and then they walked out of the familiar neighbourhood and tried a strange restaurant or hotel—but not often.

Usually Martie had Swain's famous toasted muffins for her breakfast, daintily playing with coffee and fruit while Wallace disposed of cereal, eggs and ham, and fried potatoes. She used to marvel that he never grew fat on this hearty fare; sometimes he had sharp touches of indigestion.

Over their meal they talked untiringly, marvelling anew at the miracle of their finding each other. Martie learned her husband's nature as if it had been a book. Sensitive here—evasive there; a little coarse, perhaps, a little simple. However surprising his differences it was for her to adapt herself. She was almost glad when his unconscious demands required of her the smallest sacrifice; getting so much, how glad she was to give!

After breakfast, when Wallace was not rehearsing and they were free to amuse themselves, they prowled through the Chinese quarter, and through the Italian colony. They rode on windy "dummies" out to the beach, and went scattering peanut shells along the wet sands. They visited the Park, the Mint, and the big baths, or crossed to Oakland or Sausalito, where Martie learned to swim. Martie found Wallace tireless in his appetite for excursions, and committed herself cheerfully to his guidance. Catching a train, they rejoiced; missing it, they were none the less happy.

Twice a week a matinee performance brought Wallace to the Granada Theatre at one o'clock. On other days, rehearsals began at eleven and ended at three or occasionally as late as four. The theatre life charmed Martie like a fairy tale. She never grew tired of its thrill.

It was gratifying in the first place to enter the door marked "Stage" with a supplementary legend, NO ADMITTANCE, and pass the old doorkeeper who knew and liked her. The dark passages beyond, smelling of escaping gas and damp straw, of unaired rooms and plumbing and fresh paint, were perfumed with romance to her, as were the little dressing rooms with old photographs stuck in the loosened wallpaper and dim initials scratched on the bare walls, and odd wigs and scarfs and paint jars littering the shelves. Wallace making up his face was an exalted being in the eyes of his wife.

When the play began, she took her station in the wings—silent, unobtrusive, eager to keep out of everybody's way, eager not to miss a word of the play. The man over her head, busy with his lights; the one or two shirt-sleeved, elderly men who invariably stood dispassionately watching the performance; the stage-hands; the various members of the cast: for all these she had a smile, and their answering smiles were Martie's delight.

"Take off ten pounds, Martie, and Bellew will give you a show some time!" said Maybelle La Rue, who was Mabel Cluett in private life. Martie gasped at the mere thought. She determined to diet.

A few months before, she had supposed that social intercourse was a large factor in the actor's life, that midnight suppers were shared by the cast, and that intimacy of an unconventional if harmless nature reigned among them. Now, with some surprise, she learned that this was not the case. The actors, leaving the play at different moments, quietly got into their street clothes and disappeared; so that Mabel and Wallace, usually holding the stage for the last few moments by reason of their respective parts of maid and lover, often left a theatre empty of performers except for themselves. Jesse would frequently reach home enough earlier to be sound asleep when his wife rushed in to seize her hungry and fretting baby. Little Leroy spent the early evening in Martie's bed; one of the maids in the house being paid in Mabel's old finery for coming to look at the children now and then.

At intervals the Bannisters and the Cluetts did have little after-theatre suppers, but Martie was heroically dieting, Mabel tired and sleepy, and both gentlemen somewhat subject to indigestion. So Martie and Wallace more often went alone, Martie drinking bouillon and nibbling a cracker, and her husband devouring large orders of coffee and scrambled eggs.

They had been married perhaps eight weeks when Wallace astonished her by drinking too much. She had always fancied herself too broad-minded to resent this in the usual wifely way, but the fact angered her, and she suffered over the incident for days.

It was immediately after the termination of his successful engagement, and he and the Cluetts were celebrating the inauguration of a rest. With two or three other members of the cast, they went to dine at the Cliff House, preceding the dinner with several cocktails apiece. There was a long wait for the planked steak, during which time more cocktails were ordered; Martie, who had merely tasted the first one, looking on amiably as the others drank.

Presently Mabel began to laugh unrestrainedly, much to Martie's half-comprehending embarrassment. The men, far from seeming to be shocked by her hysteria, laughed violently themselves.

"Time f'r 'nother round cocktails!" Jesse said. Martie turned to her husband.

"Wallace! Don't order any more. Not until we've had some solid food, anyway. Can't you see that we don't need them?"

"What is it, dear?" Wallace moved his eyes heavily to look at her. His face was flushed, and as he spoke he wet his lips with his tongue. "Whatever you say, darling," he said earnestly. "You have only to ask, and I will give you anything in my power. Let me know what you wish——"

"I want you not to drink any more," Martie said distressedly.

"Why not, Martie—why not, li'l girl?" Wallace asked her caressingly. He put his arm about her shoulders, breathing hotly in her face. "Do you know that I am crazy about you?" he murmured.

"If you are," Martie answered, with an uncomfortable glance about for watching eyes, "please, please——!"

"Martie," he said lovingly, "do you think I am drinking too much?"

"Well—well, I think you have had enough, Wallace," she stammered.

"Dearie, I will stop if you say so," he answered, "but you amuse me. I am just as col' sober——" And, a fresh reinforcement of cocktails having arrived, he drank one off as he spoke, setting down the little empty glass with a long gasp.

After that the long evening was an agony to Martie. Mabel laughed and screamed; wine was spilled; the food was wasted and wrecked. Wallace's face grew hotter and hotter. Jesse became sodden and sleepy; champagne packed in a bucket of ice was brought, and Martie saw Wallace's gold pieces pay for it.

It was not an unusual scene. She had looked on at just such scenes, taking place at the tables all about her, more than once in the last few weeks. Even now, this was not the only group that had dined less wisely than well. But the shame of it, the fear of what might happen before Wallace was safely at home in bed, sickened Martie to the soul.

She went to the dressing room with Mabel, who was sick. Presently they were all out in a drizzling rain, stumbling their way up the hill and blundering aboard a street car. Two nice, quiet women on the opposite seat watched the group in shocked disgust; Martie felt that she would never hold up her head again. Wallace fell when they got off, and his hat rolled in the mud. Martie tried to help him, somehow got him upstairs to his room, somehow got him into bed, where he at once fell asleep, and snored.

It was just eleven o'clock. Martie washed her face, and brushed her hair, and sat down, in a warm wrapper, staring gloomily at the unconscious form on the bed. She could hear Mabel and Jesse laughing and quarrelling in the room adjoining. Presently Mabel came in for the baby, who usually slept in Martie's room during the earlier part of the night, so that his possible crying would not disturb Bernadette.

"Poor Wallace—he is all in, down and out!" Mabel said, settling herself to nurse the baby. She looked flushed and excited still, but was otherwise herself. "He certainly was lit up like a battleship," she added in an amused voice; "as for me, I'm ashamed of myself—I'm always that way!"

Martie's indignant conviction was that Mabel might indeed be ashamed of herself, and this airy expression of what should have been penitence too deep for words, gave her a curious shock.

"They all do it," said Mabel, smiling after a long yawn, "and I suppose it's better to have their wives with 'em, than to have 'em go off by themselves!"

"They all SHOULDN'T do it!" Martie answered sombrely.

"Well, no; I suppose they shouldn't!" Mabel conceded amiably. She carried the baby away, and Martie sat on, gazing sternly at the unconscious Wallace.

Half an hour passed, another half hour. Martie had intended to do some serious thinking, but she found herself sleepy.

After a while she crept in beside her husband, and went to sleep, her heart still hot with anger.

But when the morning came she forgave him, as she was often to forgive him. What else could she do? The sunlight was streaming into their large, shabby bedroom, cable cars were rattling by, fog whistles from the bay penetrated the soft winter air. Martie was healthily hungry for breakfast, Wallace awakened good natured and penitent.

"You were a darling to me last night, Mart," he said appreciatively.

Martie had not known he was awake. She turned from her mirror, regarding him steadily between the curtains of her shining hair.

"And you're a darling not to rub it in," Wallace pursued.

"I WOULD rub it in," Martie said in a hurt voice, "if I thought it would do any good!"

Wallace sat up, and pressed his hands against his forehead.

"Well, believe me—that was the last!" he said fervently. "Never again!"

"Oh, dearest," Martie said, coming to sit beside him, "I hope you mean that!" That he did mean it, they both believed.

Half an hour later, when they went out to breakfast, she was in her happiest mood. The little cloud, in vanishing, had left the sky clearer than before. But some little quality of blind admiration and faith was gone from her wifeliness thereafter.

In December the stock company had a Re-engagement Extraordinary, and Martie got her first part. It was not much of a part—three lines—but she approached it with passionate seriousness, and when the first rehearsal came, rattled off her three lines so glibly that the entire jaded company and the director enjoyed a refreshing laugh. At the costumier's, in a fascinating welter of tarnished and shabby garments, she selected a suitable dress, and Wallace coached her, made up her face, and prompted her with great pride. So the tiny part went well, and one of the papers gave a praising line to "Junoesque Miss Salisbury." These were happy days. Martie loved the odorous, dark, crowded world behind the scenes, loved to be a part of it. This was living indeed!

And Sally was expecting a baby! Martie laughed aloud from sheer excitement and pleasure when the news came. It was almost like having one herself; in one way even more satisfactory, because she was too busy now to be interrupted. She spent the first money she had ever earned in sending Sally a present for the baby; smiling again whenever she pictured Sally was showing it to old friends in Monroe: "From Martie; isn't it gorgeous?"

The weeks fled by. Wallace began to talk of moving to New York. It was always their dream. Instinctively they wanted New York. Their talk of it, their plans for it, were as enthusiastic as they were ignorant, if Wallace could only get the chance to play on Broadway! That seemed to both of them the goal of their ambition. Always hopeful of another part, Martie began to read and study seriously. She had much spare time, and she used it. From everybody and everything about her she learned: a few German phrases from the rheumatic old man whose wife kept the lodging house; Juliet's lines and the lines of Lady Macbeth from Mabel's shabby books; and something of millinery from the little Irishwoman who kept a shop on the corner, with "Elise" written across its window. She learned all of Wallace's parts, and usually Mabel's as well. Often she went to the piano in the musty parlour of the Geary Street house and played "The Two Grenadiers" and "Absent." She brimmed with energy; while Wallace or Mabel wrangled with the old costumier, Martie was busily folding and smoothing the garments of jesters and clowns and Dolly Vardens. She had a curious instinct for trade terms; she could not buy a yard of veiling without an eager little talk with the saleswoman; the chance phrase of a conductor or the woman in the French laundry amused and interested her.

Away from all the repressing influences of her childhood, healthy and happy, she met the claims of the new state with a splendid and unthinking passion. To yield herself generously and supremely was the only natural thing; she had no dread and no regret. From the old life she brought to this hour only an instinctive reticence, so that Mabel never had the long talks and the short talks she had anticipated with the bride, and never dared say a word to Martie that might not have been as safely said to Bernadette.



CHAPTER II

On A hot Sunday in early March Martie came back from church to find Wallace gone. She had had no breakfast, but had stopped on the way home to get six enormous oranges in a paper bag. The heat had given her a stupid headache, and she felt limp and tired. It was delicious to undress, to climb into the smoothed bed, and to sink back against the pillows.

A bulky newspaper, smelling of printer's ink, was on the chair beside her bed, but Martie did not open it for a while. Serious thoughts held her. Opening her orange, she said to herself, with a little flutter at her heart, that it must be so. She was going to have a baby!

Fear and pride shook her. It seemed a tremendous thing; not at all like the other babies other women had been having since time began. She could not believe it—of herself, Martie Monroe, who had been an ignorant girl only a few months ago!

Yet she had been vaguely suspecting the state of affairs for more than a week; when morning after morning found her languid and weary, when Wallace's fork crushing an egg-yolk had given her a sudden sensation of nausea. She felt so stupid, so tired all the time. She could not sleep at night; she could hardly stay awake in the daytime.

Her eyes were heavy now. She glanced indifferently at the newspaper, smiled a contented little smile, and, murmuring, "I wonder—I wonder—" and fell into delicious sleep.

She slept for a long time. Wallace, coming in at two o'clock, awakened her. Afternoon sunlight was streaming into the room, which was scented with the decaying sweetness of orange peel. Dazed and stupid, yet dreamily content, Martie smiled upon him. He hated Sunday rehearsals: she could see that he was in a bad mood, and his obvious effort to think of her and to disguise his own feeling touched her.

"Tired?" she asked affectionately. "Isn't it hot?"

"How are you?" Wallace questioned in turn. "You felt so rotten yesterday."

He sat down beside her, and pushed the dark hair from his big forehead, and she saw that his face was damp and pale.

"Fine!" she assured him, laying her hand over his.

They remained so for a full minute, Wallace staring gloomily at nothing, Martie's eyes idly roving about the room. Then the man reached for a section of the paper, glanced at it indifferently, and flung it aside.

"There wasn't any rehearsal this morning," he observed after a pause. He cleared his throat self-consciously before speaking and Martie, glancing quickly at him, saw that he intended the statement to have a significance.

"Where were you then?" she asked duly.

"I was—I was—" He hesitated, expelling a long breath suddenly. "Something came up," he amended, "and I had to see about it."

"What came up?" Martie pursued, more anxious to set his mind at rest, than curious.

"Well—it all goes back to some time ago, Mart; before I knew you," Wallace said, in a carefully matter-of-fact tone. But she could see that he was troubled, and a faint stir of apprehension shook her own heart.

"Money?" she guessed quickly.

"No," he said reassuringly, "nothing like that!"

He got up, and restlessly circled the room, drawing the shade that was rattling gently at the window, flinging his coat across a chair.

Then he went back, and sat down by the bed again, locking his dropped hands loosely between his knees, and looking steadily at the worn old colourless carpet.

"You see this Golda—" he began.

"Golda who?" Martie echoed.

"This girl I've been talking to this morning," Wallace supplied impatiently; "Golda White."

"Who is she?" Martie asked, bewildered, as his heavy voice stopped on the name.

"Oh, she's a girl I used to know! I haven't seen her for eight or ten years—since I left Portland, in fact."

"But who IS she, Wallie?" Martie had propped herself in pillows, she was wide awake now, and her voice was firm and quick.

"Well, wait and I'll tell you, I'll tell you the whole thing. I don't believe there's anything in it, but anyway, I'll tell you, and you and I can sort of talk it over. You see I met this girl in Portland, when I was a kid in my uncle's lumber office. I was about twenty-two or three, and she was ten years older than that. But we ran with the same crowd a lot, and I saw her all the time——"

"She was in the office?"

"Sure. She was Uncle Chester's steno. She was a queer sort of girl; pretty, too. I was sore because my father made me work there, and I wanted to join the navy or go to college, or go on the stage, and she'd sit there making herself collars and things, and sort of console me. She was engaged to a fellow in Los Angeles, or she said she was.

"We liked each other all right, she'd tell me her troubles and I'd tell her mine; she had a stepfather she hated, and sometimes she'd cry and all that. The crowd began to jolly us about liking each other, and I could see she didn't mind it much——"

"Perhaps she loved you, Wallie?" Martie suggested on a quick, excited breath.

"You bet your life she loved me!" he affirmed positively.

"Poor girl!" said the wife in pitying anticipation of a tragedy.

"Don't call her 'poor girl!'" Wallace said, his face darkening. "She'll look out for herself. There's a lot of talk," he added with a sort of dull resentment, "about 'leading young girls astray,' and 'betraying innocence,' and all that, but I want to tell you right now that nine times out of ten it's the girls that do the leading astray! You ask any fellow——"

The expression on Martie's face did not alter by the flicker of an eyelash. She had been looking steadily at him, and she still stared steadily. But she felt her throat thicken, and the blood begin to pump convulsively at her heart.

"But Wallace," she stammered eagerly, "she wasn't—she wasn't——"

"Sure she was!" he said coarsely; "she was as rotten as the rest of them!"

"But—but——" Martie's lips felt dry, her voice failed her.

"I was only a kid, I tell you," said Wallace, uneasily watching her. "Why, Mart," he added, dropping on his knees beside the bed, and putting his arms about her, "all boys are like that! Every one knows it. There isn't a man you know——And you're the only girl I ever loved, Sweetheart, you know that. Men are different, that's all. A boy growing up can't any more keep out of it——And I never lied to you, Mart. I told you when we were engaged that I wished to God, for your sake, that I'd never——"

"Yes, I know!" Martie whispered, shutting her eyes. He kissed her suddenly colourless cheek, and she heard him move away.

"Well, to go on with the rest of this," Wallace resumed suddenly. Martie opened tired eyes to watch him, but he did not meet her look.

"Golda and I went together for about a year," he said, "and finally she got to talking as if we were going to be married. One day—it was a rainy day in the office, and I had a cold, and she fixed me up something hot to drink—she got to crying, and she said her stepfather had ordered her out of the house. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now, but anyway, we talked it all over, and she said she was going down to Los Angeles and hunt up this other fellow. Well, that made me feel kind of sick, because we had been going together for so long, and her talking about how things would be when we were married and all that, and I said—you know the way you do—'What's the matter with us getting married, right now?'"

Martie's face was fixed in a look of agonized attention: she made no sound.

"She said we wouldn't have anything to live on," Wallace pursued, not looking at his wife, "and that she wanted to take a rest when she got married, and have a little fun. Well, I says, we can keep it quiet for awhile. Well, we talked about it that day, and after that we would kind of josh about it, and finally one day we walked over to the bureau and got out a license, and the Justice of the Peace——"

"Wallie—my God!" Martie breathed.

"Well, listen!" he urged her impatiently. "I put a wrong age on the license and so did she, and she had told me a lot of lies about herself, as I found out later, Martie——"

"So that it wasn't legal!"

"Well, listen. After that we went on with the crowd for a few weeks, and we didn't tell anybody. And then this Dr. Prendergast turned up——"

"WHAT Dr. Prendergast!"

"I don't know who he was—a dentist anyway. And he had known Golda before, somewhere, and he was crazy about her. His wife was getting a divorce, it seems; anyway, he butted right in, and she let him. I don't think she had awfully good sense, she would act sort of crazy sometimes, as if she didn't know what she was doing. Well, I told her I wouldn't stand for that, and we had some fights. But just then my dad wrote and told me that he would finance me for a year at Stanford, and I began to think I'd like to cut the whole bunch. So I said to Golda: 'I'm done. I'm going to get out! You keep your mouth shut, and I'll keep mine!' She says, 'Leon'—that was Prendergast—'is going to marry me, and you'll talk before I do!' So——"

"But, Wallace——"

"But what, dearie?"

"But it wasn't left that way?"

"Now, listen, dearie. Of course it wasn't! She and Prendergast were going to leave town, a few days later, but I was kind of worried about it, and I finally told my uncle the whole story. Of course he blew up! He sent for her, and she came right in, scared to death. He told her that he'd give away the whole story to Prendergast, or else he'd give her a check for five hundred dollars on her wedding day. She fell for it, and we said good-bye. She swore it was only a sort of joke anyway, and that the day we—we did it, she'd been filling me up with whisky lemonades and all that, and that the whole thing was off. And let me tell you that I was glad to beat it! I never saw her again until this morning! I went on the stage, and changed my name because the leading lady in that show happened to be Thelma Tenney. About a month later my uncle wrote me that she had sent him a newspaper notice of her marriage, and he had sent her the check. I'll never forget reading that letter. I'd been worrying myself black in the face, but that day I went on a bust, I can tell you!"

"That marriage would cancel the other?" Martie asked, with a dry throat.

"Sure it would!" he said easily.

"But now—now——" she pursued fearfully.

"Now she's turned up," he said, a shadow falling on his heavy face again. "She was at the theatre last night. God knows what she's been doing all these years; she looks awful. She saw my picture in some paper, and she came straight to the city. She found out where I lived, and this morning, while you were at church, Mabel came in and said a lady wanted to see me. I took her to breakfast. I didn't know what to do with her—and we talked."

"And what does she say, Wallie—what does she want?"

"Oh, she wants anything she can get! She doesn't know that I'm married. If she did, I suppose she might make herself unpleasant along that line!"

"But she has no claim on you! She married another man!"

"She says now that she never was married to Prendergast!"

"But she WAS!" Martie said hotly. Her voice dropped vaguely. Her eyes were fixed and glassy with growing apprehension. "Perhaps she was lying about that," she whispered, as if to herself.

"She'd lie about anything!" Wallace supplied.

"But if she wasn't, Wallace, if she wasn't—then would that second marriage cancel the first?" she asked feverishly.

"I should THINK so!" he answered. "Shouldn't you?"

"Shouldn't I?" she echoed, with her first flash of anger. "Why, what do I know about it? What do I know about it? I don't know anything! You come to me with this now—NOW!"

"Don't talk like that!" he pleaded. "I feel—I feel awfully about it, Martie! I can't tell you how I feel! But the whole thing was so long ago it had sort of gone out of my mind. Every fellow does things that he's ashamed of, Mart—things that he's sorry for; but you always think that you'll marry some day, and have kids, and that the world will go on like it always has——"

The fire suddenly died out of Martie. In a deadly calm she sat back against her pillows, and began to gather up her masses of loosened hair.

"If she is right——" she began, and stopped.

"She's not right, I tell you!" Wallace said. "She hasn't got a leg to stand on!"

"No," Martie conceded lifelessly, patiently. "But if she SHOULD be right——"

"But I tell you she isn't, Mart!"

"Yes, I know you do." The deadly gentleness was again in her voice. "I know you do!" she repeated mildly. "Only—only——" Her lip trembled despite her desperate effort, she felt her throat thicken and the tears come.

Instantly he was beside her again, and with her arms still raised she felt him put his own arms about her, and felt his penitent kisses through the veil of her hair. A sickness swept over her: they were here in the sacred intimacy of their own room, the room to which he had brought her as a bride only a few months before.

She freed herself with what dignity she could command. He asked her a hundred times if she loved him, if she could forgive him. Her one impulse was to silence him, to have him go away.

"I know—I know how you feel, Wallie! I'm sorry—for you and myself, and the whole thing! I'm terribly sorry! I—I don't know what we can do. I have to go away, of course; I can't stay here until we know; and you'll have to investigate, and find out just what she claims. I'll go to Sally, I suppose. People can think I've come up to help when the baby comes—I don't care what they think!"

"I thought you might go to Oakland for awhile," he agreed, gratefully; "but of course it'll be best to have you go to Sally—it'll only be for a few days. Mart, I feel rotten about it!"

"I know you do, Wallace," she answered nervously.

"To spring this on you—it's just rotten!"

Martie was silent. Her mind was in a whirl.

"Will you go out?" she asked simply. "I want to dress."

"What do you want me to go out for?" he asked, amazed.

Again his wife was silent. Her cheeks were bright scarlet, her eyes hard and dry. She looked at him steadily, and he got clumsily to his feet.

"Sure I'll go out!" he said stupidly. "I'll do anything you want me to. I feel like a skunk about this—it had sort of slipped my mind, Mart! Every fellow lets himself in for something like this."

Trapped. It was the one thought she had when he was gone, and when she had sprung feverishly from bed, and was quickly dressing. Trapped, in this friendly, comfortable room, where she had been so happy and so proud! She had been so innocently complacent over her state as this man's wife, she had planned for their future so courageously. Now she was—what? Now she was—what?

Just to escape somehow and instantly, that was the first wild impulse. He was gone, but he was coming back: he must not find her here. She must disappear, nobody must ever find her. Sally and her father, Rose and Rodney must never know! Martie Monroe, married to a man who was married before, disgraced, exiled, lost. Nobody knew that she was going to have a baby, but Monroe would surmise that.

Oh, fool—fool—fool that she had been to marry him so! But it was too late for that. She must face the situation now, and fret over the past some other day.

She had felt the thought of a return to Monroe intolerable: but quickly she changed her mind. Sally's home might be an immediate retreat, she could rest there, and plan there. Her sister was eagerly awaiting an answer to the letter in which she begged Martie to come to her for the month of the baby's birth.

Martie, packing frantically, glanced at the clock. It was two o'clock now, she could get the four o'clock boat. She would be in peaceful Monroe at seven. And after that——?

After that she did not know. Should she ever return to Wallace, under any circumstances? Should she tell Sally? Should she hide both Wallace's revelations and the morning's earlier hopes of motherhood?

Child that she was, she could not decide. She had had no preparation for these crises, she was sick with shock and terror. Married to a man who was already married—and perhaps to have a baby!

But she never faltered in her instant determination to leave him. If she was not his wife, at least she could face the unknown future far more bravely than the dubious present. If she had been wrong, she would not add more wrong.

With her bag packed, and her hat pinned on, she paused, and looked about the room. The window curtain flapped uncertainly, a gritty wind blew straight down Geary Street. The bed was unmade, the sweet orange peels still scented the air.

Martie suddenly flung her gloves aside, and knelt down beside her bed. She had an impulse to make her last act in this room a prayer.

Wallace, pale and quiet, opened the door, and as she rose from her knees their eyes met. In a second they were in each other's arms, and Martie was sobbing on his shoulder.

"Mart—my darling little girl! I'm so sorry!"

"I know you are—I know you are!"

"It's only for a few days, dearie—until I settle her once and for all!"

"That's all!"

"And then you'll come back, and we'll go have Spanish omelette at the Poodle Dog, won't we?"

"Oh, Wallie, darling, I hope—I hope we will!"

She gasped on a long breath, and dried her eyes.

"How much money have you got, dearie?"

"About—I don't know. About four dollars, I think."

"Well, here—" He was all the husband again, stuffing gold pieces into her purse. "You're going down to the four boat? I'll take you down. And wire me when you get there, Martie, so I won't worry. And tell Sally I wish her luck, I'll certainly be glad to hear the news." They were at the doorway; he put his arm about her. "You DO love me, Mart?"

"Oh, Wallie——!" The tender moment, following upon her hour of lonely agony, was almost too much. "We—we didn't think—this would be the end of our happy time, did we?" she stammered. And as they kissed again, both faces were wet with tears.

Sally met her; a Sally ample of figure and wonderful in complexion. All the roses of spring were in Sally's smiling face; she laughed and rejoiced at their meeting with a certain quality of ease and poise for which Martie was puzzled to account, but which was new to quiet, conventional Sally. Sally was in the serene mood that immediately precedes motherhood; all the complex elements of her life were temporarily lapped in a joyous peace. Of Martie's hidden agony she suspected nothing.

She took Martie to the tiny house by the river; the plates and spoons and pillow-slips looked strange to Martie, and for every one of them Sally had an amused history. Martie felt, with a little twinge of pain, that she would have liked a handsomer home for Sally, would have liked a more imposing husband than the tired, dirty, boyish-looking Joe, would have liked the first Monroe baby to come to a prettier layette than these plain little slips and flannels; but Sally saw everything rose-coloured. They had almost no money, she told Martie, with a happy laugh. Already Sally, who had been brought up in entire ignorance of the value of money, was watching the pennies. Never had there been economy like this in Pa's house!

Sally kept house on a microscopic scale that amused and a little impressed Martie. Every apple, every onion, was used to the last scrap. Every cold muffin was reheated, or bit of cold toast was utilized. When Carrie David brought the young householders a roasted chicken, it was an event. The fowl was sliced and stewed and minced and made into soup before it went into the family annals to shine forevermore as "the delicious chicken Cousin Carrie brought us before the baby was born." Sally's cakes were made with one egg, her custards reinforced with cornstarch, her cream was only "top milk." Even her house was only half a house: the four rooms were matched by four other rooms, with only a central wall between. But Sally had a square yard, and a garden, and Martie came to love every inch of the little place, so rich in happiness and love.

The days went on and on, and there was no word of Wallace. Martie's heart was like lead in her breast. She talked with Sally, set tables, washed dishes, she laughed and planned, and all the while misgivings pressed close about her. Sometimes, kneeling in church in the soft warm afternoons of early spring, she told herself that if this one cup were taken from her lips, if she were only proved to be indeed an honourable wife, she would bear with resignation whatever life might bring. She would welcome poverty, welcome humiliations, welcome the suffering and the burden of the baby's coming—but dear Lord, dear Lord, she could not face the shame that menaced her now!

Sally saw the change in her, the new silence and gravity, and wondered.

"Martie, dearest, something's worrying you?"

"Nothing much, dear. Wallace—Wallace doesn't write to me as often as I should like!"

"You didn't quarrel with him, Mart?"

"Oh, no—he's the best husband in the world. We never quarrel."

"But it's not like you to fret so," Sally grieved. Presently she ventured a daring question: "Has it ever occurred to you, Mart, that perhaps——"

Martie laughed shakily.

"The way you and Grace wish babies on to people—it's the limit!"

Sally laughed, too, and if she was unconvinced, at least she said no more. She encouraged Martie to take long walks, to help with the housework, and finally, to attempt composition. Sitting at the clean little kitchen table, in the warm evenings, Martie wrote an article upon the subject of independence for women.

For a few days she laboured tirelessly with it: then she tired of it, and flung it aside. Other things absorbed her attention.

First came the expected letter from Wallace. Martie's hand shook as she took it from the postman. Now she would know—now she would know! Whatever the news, the suspense was over.

Perhaps the hardest moment of the hard weeks was when she realized that the tension was not snapped, after all. Wallace wrote affectionately, but with maddening vagueness. He missed his girl, he had a rotten cold, he was not working now. Golda was raising hell. He did not believe half that she said, but he had written to his uncle, who advised him to go to Portland, and investigate the matter there. So unless Martie heard to the contrary he would probably go north this week. Anyway, Martie had better stay where she was, and not worry.

Not worry! It became a marvel to Martie that life could go on for any one while her own future was so frightfully uncertain. She was going to have a baby, and she was not married—that was the summary of the situation. It was like something in a book, only worse than any book that she had ever read. Sometimes she felt as if her brain were being affected by the sheer horror of it. Sometimes, Sally noticed, Martie fell into such deep brooding that she neither heard nor saw what went on about her. Her mind was in a continual fever; she was exhausted with fruitless hoping and unavailing endurance.

At the end of a hot, endless April day, into the darkness of Sally's disordered bedroom, came life. A little hemstitched blanket had been made ready for the baby; it seemed to Martie's frightened heart nothing short of a miracle when Sally's crying daughter was actually wrapped in it. Martie had travelled a long road since the placid spring afternoon when they had made that blanket.

But the strain and fright were over now; Sally lay at peace, her eyes shut in a white face. The tears dried on Martie's cheeks; Mrs. Hawkes and Dr. Ben were even laughing as they consulted and worked together. Martie took the baby down to the kitchen for her bath, and it seemed strange to her that the dried peaches Sally had set on the stove that morning were still placidly simmering in their saucepan.

For a day or two everything was unreal, the smoke of battle and the shadow of death still hung over the little household. Gradually, the air cleared. Joe and Martie ate the deluge of layer cakes and apple pies—debated over details. Joe's mother came in to bathe the baby and Sally did nothing but laugh and eat and sleep. She called her first-born Elizabeth, for her mother; and sometimes the sisters wondered if Ma and Lydia ever talked about the first baby, and ever longed to see her first tiny charms.

The event shook Martie from her brooding, and brought her the first real happiness she had known since the terrible morning of Golda's appearance. She and Sally found the care of the baby only a delight, and disputed for the privilege of bathing and dressing her.

One episode in the tiny Elizabeth's life was unusual, and long years afterward Martie found a place for it in her own slowly-forming theories. At the time the three young persons debated it amusedly and carelessly before it came to be just an accepted, if incomprehensible, fact.

Dr. Ben, whose modest bill for attendance upon Sally was promptly paid, had sent the baby a check for seventy-five dollars. The card with this check was merely pencilled: "For Miss Elizabeth's first quarter, from Uncle Ben." At first Sally and Martie and Joe were puzzled to understand it.

Then suddenly Sally remembered her talk with the doctor a year ago. This was the "mother's pay" he had spoken about then.

"It does seem funny that we were only girls then, and that to speak of such things really made me almost die of embarrassment," smiled Sally, "and now, here we are, and we know all about it! But now, the question is, what to do?"

Sally and Joe were at first for a polite refusal of the money. It was so "queer," they said. It seemed too "odd." It was not as if Pa had decided to do it, or as if Dr. Ben really was the child's uncle. It was better not to chance possible complications—

Presently Joe dropped out of this debate. He said simply that it was a deuce of a lot of money, and that there were lots of things that the baby needed, but he didn't care either way. Sally then said that it was settled, for if he didn't care the check should go back.

But here Martie found herself with an opinion. She said suddenly that she thought Sally would be foolish to refuse. It was Dr. Ben's money. If he endowed a library, or put a conservatory into the Monroe Park, Sally would enjoy them to the full. Why shouldn't he do this? His money and the way he spent it were his own affair.

"He's working out an experiment, Sally. I don't see why you shouldn't let him. You may never have another baby, but if you do, why six hundred a year is just that much better than three!"

There were several days of debate. It was inevitable that the check lying on Sally's cheap little three-drawer bureau should suggest things it would purchase. Martie summarily took it to the Bank one day and brought home crackling bills in exchange. One of the first things that was purchased was the perambulator in which 'Lizabeth was proudly wheeled to call upon her benefactor.

Then the dreadful days began to go by again, and still there was no letter from Wallace. June came in with enervating, dry heat, and Martie wilted under it. There was no longer any doubt about her condition. The hour was coming closer when Sally must know, when all Monroe must know just how mad a venture her marriage had been.

One day she had a letter from Mabel, who begged her to come back to the city. Jesse was sure he could get her an occasional engagement; it was better than fretting herself to death there in that "jay" town.

Martie sat thinking for a long time with this letter in her hand. For the first time thoughts consciously hostile to Wallace swept through her mind. She analyzed the motives that had urged her into marriage; she had been taught to think of it as a woman's surest refuge. If she had not been so taught, what might she have done for herself in this year? Was it fair of him to take what she had to give then, in quick and generous devotion, and to fail her so utterly now, when the old physical supremacy was gone, and when she must meet, in the future, not only her own needs but the needs of a child? He had known more of life than she—her mother and father had known more—why had nobody helped her?

That evening, when Sally and Joe had gone to the moving pictures, leaving Martie to listen for 'Lizabeth's little snuffle of awakening, should she unexpectedly awake, Martie cleared the dining-room table and wrote to Wallace.

This was not one of her cheerful, courageous letters, filled with affectionate solicitude for him, and brave hope for the future. She wept over the pages, she reproached and blamed him. For the first time she told him of the baby's coming. She was his wife, he must help her get away, at least until she was well again. She was sick of waiting and hoping; now he must answer her, he must advise her.

Her face was wet with tears; she went that night to mail it at the corner. Afterward she lay long awake, wondering in her ignorant girl's heart if such an unwifely tirade were sufficient cause for divorce, wondering if he would ever love her again after reading it.

Wallace brought the answer himself, five days later. Coming in from a lonely walk, Martie found him eating bread and jam and scrambled eggs in Sally's kitchen. The sight of him there in the flesh, smiling and handsome, was almost too much for her. She rushed into his arms, and sobbed and laughed like a madwoman, as she assured herself of his blessed reality.

Sally, in sympathetic tears herself, tried to join in Wallace's heartening laugh, and Martie, quieted, sat on the arm of her husband's chair, feeling again the delicious comfort of his arm about her, and smiling with dark lashes still wet.

After a while they were alone, and then they talked freely.

"Wallie—only tell me this! Have you got enough money to get me away somewhere? I can't stay here! You see that! Oh, dearest, if you knew——"

"Get you away! Why, you're going with me! We're going to New York!"

Her bewildered eyes were fixed upon him with dawning hope.

"But Golda!" she said.

"Oh, Golda!" He dismissed the adventuress impatiently. "Now I'll tell you all about that some time, dear——"

"But, Wallace, it's—it's ALL RIGHT?" Martie must turn the knife in the wound now, there must be no more doubt.

"All RIGHT?" The old bombastic, triumphant voice! "Her husband's alive, if you call THAT all right!"

"Her husband?" Martie's voice died in a sort of faintness.

"Sure! She was married six years before I ever saw her. Uncle Chess says he heard it, and then forgot it, you know the way you do? I've been to Portland and Uncle Chess was bully. His old lawyer, whom he consulted at the time I left there, was dead, but we dug up the license bureau and found what we were after. She had been married all right and her husband's still living. We found him in the Home for Incurables up there; been there fifteen years. I got a copy of her marriage license from the Registrar and if Mrs. Golda White Ferguson ever turns up again we'll see who does the talking about bigamy! The she-devil! And I told you about meeting Dawson?"

"Oh, God, I thank Thee—I thank Thee!" Martie was breathing to herself, her eyes closed. "Dawson?" she asked, when he repeated the name.

Wallace had straightened up; it was quite in his old manner that he said:

"I—would—rather work for Emory Dawson than for any man I know of in New York!"

"Oh, a manager?"

"The coming manager—you mark what I say!"

"And you met him?" Martie was asking the dutiful questions; but her face rested against her husband's as she talked, and she was crying a little, in joy and relief.

For answer Wallace gently dislodged her, so that he might take from his pocket a letter, the friendly letter that the manager had dashed off.

"He swears he'll book me!" Wallace said, refolding the letter. "He said he needs me, and I need him. I borrowed two hundred from Uncle Chess, and now it's us to the bright lights, Baby!"

"And nothing but happiness—happiness—happiness!" Martie said, returning his handkerchief, and finishing the talk with one of her eager kisses and with a child's long sigh.

"I was afraid you might be a little sorry about—November, Wallie," said she, after a while. "You are glad, a little; aren't you?"

"Sure!" he answered good-naturedly. "You can't help it!"

Martie looked at him strangely, as if she were puzzled or surprised. Was it her fault? Were women to be blamed for bearing? But she rested her case there, and presently Sally came in, wheeling the baby, and there was a disorderly dinner of sausages and fresh bread and strawberries, with everybody jumping up and sitting down incessantly. Wallace was a great addition to the little group; they were all young enough to like the pose of lovers, to flush and dimple over the new possessives, over the odd readjustment of relationships. The four went to see the moving pictures in the evening, and came home strewing peanut-shells on the sidewalk, laughing and talking.

Two little clouds spoiled the long-awaited glory of going to New York for Martie, when early in July she and Wallace really arranged to go. One was the supper he gave a night or two before they left to various young members of the Hawkes family, Reddy Johnson, and one or two other men. Martie thought it was "silly" to order wine and to attempt a smart affair in the dismal white dining room of the hotel; she resented the opportunity Wallace gave her old friends to see him when he was not at his best. She scolded him for incurring the unnecessary expense.

The second cloud lay in the fact that, without consulting her, he had borrowed money from Rodney Parker. This stung Martie's pride bitterly.

"Wallace, WHY did you?" she asked with difficult self-control.

"Oh, well; it was only a hundred; and he's coining money," Wallace answered easily. "I breezed into the Bank one day, and he was boasting about his job, and his automobile. He took out his bank book and showed me his balance. And all of a sudden it occurred to me I might make a touch. I told him about Dawson." He looked at his wife's dark, resentful face. "Don't you worry, Mart," he said. "YOU didn't borrow it!"

Martie silently resuming her packing reflected upon the irony of life. She was married, she was going to New York. What a triumphant achievement of her dream of a year ago! And yet her heart was so heavy that she might almost have envied that old, idle Martie, wandering under the trees of Main Street and planning so hopefully for the future.

On the day before she left, exhilarated with the confusion, the new hat she had just bought, the packed trunks, she went to see her mother. It was a strange hour that she spent in the old sitting room, in the cool, stale, home odours, with the home pictures, the jointed gas brackets under which she had played solitaire and the square piano where she had sung "The Two Grenadiers." Outside, in the sunken garden, summer burgeoned fragrantly; the drawn window shades bellied softly to and fro, letting in wheeling spokes of light, shutting down the twilight again. Lydia and her mother, like gentle ghosts, listened to her, reproving and unsympathetic.

"Pa is angry with you, Martie, arid who can blame him?" said Lydia. "I'm sure I never heard of such actions, coming from a girl who had loving parents and a good home!"

This was the mother's note. Lydia was always an echo.

"It isn't as if you hadn't had everything, Mart. You girls had everything you needed—that party at Thanksgiving and all! And you've no idea of the TALK in town! Pa feels it terribly. To think that other girls, even like Rose, who had no father, should have so much more sense than OUR girls."

Martie talked of Sally's baby. "Named for you, Ma," she told her mother. And with sudden earnestness she added: "WHY don't you go see it some day? It's the dearest baby I ever saw!"

Mrs. Monroe, who had a folded handkerchief in her bony, discoloured fingers, now pressed it to her eyes, shaking her head as she did so. Lydia gave Martie a resentful look, and her mother a sympathetic one, before she said primly:

"If Sally Monroe wanted Ma and me to go see her and her baby, why didn't she marry some man Pa could have been proud of, and have a church wedding and act in a way becoming to her family?"

To this Martie had nothing to say. She left messages of love for Len and for her father. Her mother and sister came with her for good-byes to the old porch with its peeling dark paint and woody rose-vines.

"Pa said at noon that you had 'phoned you wanted to come say good-bye," said her mother mildly. "I hope you'll always be happy, Martie, and remember that we did our best for you. If you're a good girl, and write some day and ask Pa's forgiveness, I think he may come 'round, because he was always a most affectionate father to his children."

The toneless, lifeless voice ceased. Martie kissed Lydia's unresponsive warm cheek, and her mother's flat soft one. She walked quickly down the old garden, through the still rich green, and smelled, as she had smelled a thousand times before, the velvety sweetness of wallflowers. As she went, she heard her sister say, in a quick, low tone:

"Look, Ma—there's Angela Baxter with that man again. I wonder who on earth he is?"



CHAPTER III

The big train moved smoothly. Martie, her arm laid against the window, felt it thrill her to her heart. She smiled steadily as she watched the group on the platform, and Sally, Joe, and all the others who had come to say good-bye smiled steadily back. Sometimes they shouted messages; but they all were secretly anxious for the train to move, and Martie, for all her smiling and nodding, was in a fever to be gone.

They vanished; all the faces she knew. The big train slid through Monroe. Martie had a last glimpse of Mason and White's—of the bridge—of the winery with its pyramids of sweet-smelling purple refuse. Outlying ranches, familiar from Sunday walks and drives, slipped by. Down near the old Archer ranch, Henry Prout was driving his mother into town. The surrey and the rusty white horse were smothered in sulphurous dust. It seemed odd to Martie that Henny was driving Mrs. Prout into town with an air of actual importance; Henny was clean, and the old lady had on cotton gloves and a stiff gray percale. Yet they were only going to hot little Monroe. Martie was going to New York!

All her life she remembered the novelty and delight of the trip. Wallace was at his best; the new hat had its share in the happy recollection. The dining car, the berths, the unchanging routine of the day—all charmed her.

She watched her first thunder storm in Chicago with awed pleasure. The hour came, when, a little jaded, feeling dirty and tumbled, feeling excited and headachy and nervous, Martie saw her neighbours in the car begin to straighten garments and gather small possessions. They were arriving!

She was silent, as first impressions jumbled themselves together in her tired brain. Wallace, at her elbow, was eager with information.

"Look, Mart—this is the Grand Central. They're going to tear all this down! Look—that's the subway—those hoods, where the people are going down! See over that way—this is Forty-Second Street, one of the biggest cross-streets there is—and over that way is Broadway! We can't take the subway, I wish we could—you wait until you see the expresses! But I'll tell you what we'll do, we'll go over and take a 'bus, on the Avenue—see, here's a Childs'—see, there's the new Library! Climb right up on the 'bus, if you get a chance, because then we can see the Park!"

Bewildered, dirty, tired, she stumbled along at his side, her eyes moving rapidly over the strange crowds, the strange buildings, the strange streets and crossings. That must be an elevated train banging along; here was a park, with men packed on the benches, and newspapers blowing lazily on the paths. And shops in all the basements—why had no one ever told her that there were shops in all the basements? And a placid church facade breaking this array of trimmed windows and crowded little enterprises! It was hot: she felt her forehead wet, her clothes seemed heavy and sticky, and her head ached dully.

"How'd you like it?" Wallace asked enthusiastically.

"I love it, sweetheart!"

Wallace, frankly embarrassed for money, took her at once to Mrs. Curley's big boarding-house in East Seventieth Street, where the Cluetts had stayed.

Mabel had told Martie that "Grandma Curley" was a "character." She was a plain, shrewd, kindly old woman, who lived in an old brownstone house that had been acquired after his death, Martie learned, for a bad debt of her husband's making. She liked everybody and believed in nobody; smiling a deep, mysterious smile when her table or her management was praised. She eyed Martie's fresh beauty appraisingly, immediately suspected her condition, was given the young wife's unreserved confidence, and, with a few brief pieces of advice, left her new boarders entirely to their own devices. Wallace's daring compliments fell upon unhearing ears; she would not lower her prices for anybody, she said. They could have the big room for eighteen, or the little one for fourteen dollars a week.

"Sixteen for the big one! You know you like our looks," said Wallace.

"I'd be losing money on it, Mr. Bannister. You can take it or leave it, just as you like."

He was a little daunted by her firmness, but in the end he told Martie that eighteen was cheap enough, and as she scattered her belongings about, his wife gave a happy assent. It was fun to be married and be boarding in New York.

She was too confused, too excited, to eat her dinner. They were both in wild spirits; and went out after dinner to take an experimental ride on the elevated train. That evening the trunk came, and Martie, feeling still in a whirl of new impressions, unpacked in the big bare bedroom; as pleased as a child to arrange her belongings in the empty bureau or hang them in the shallow closet. She had been looking forward, for five hot days, to the pleasure of a bath and a quiet bed. The bath was not to be had; neither faucet in the bathroom ran hot; but the bed was deliciously comfortable, and Martie tumbled into it with only one thought in her head: