could not be sure that she hadn't missed him. So she had gone
back to her tiny flat in Waverly Place and had spent the rest of the day
there, vainly hoping that he would turn up or at least that she should
get some word of him. And sitting around like that for hours and hours
she had, which was a silly thing to do, let her thoughts run wild over
things--a thing--that there was simply no sense in thinking about at all.

It was an odd fact, which she had noted long before today, that anything
connected with home, a letter from her father or her aunt, news of the
doings of any of her Chicago friends (the birth of Olive Corbett's second
baby, for example), any vivid projection of a bit of the pattern of the
life into which she had once been woven, roused that nightmare memory. Or
gave, rather, to a memory which normally did not trouble her much, the
quality of a nightmare; a moment of paralyzed incredulity that it could
have happened to her; a pang of clear horror that it really and truly had
happened to her very self; to this Mary Wollaston who still lived in the
very place where it had happened.

This afternoon, while she had sat awaiting from moment to moment the
appearance of her brother, or at least the sound of his voice over the
telephone, the pang had been prolonged into an agony. She had let herself
drift into a fantastic speculation of a sort that was perfectly new. What
if the boy who had shared that crazy adventure with her, himself an
officer bound overseas, had fallen in with Rush, made friends with him,
told him the story!

This was pure melodrama, she knew. There was, in any external sense,
nothing to be feared. The thing had happened almost a year ago. It had
had no consequences--except this inexplicable one that her brother's
approach brought back the buried memory of it. Why should it cling like
that? Like an acid that wouldn't wash off! She was not, as far as her
mind went, ashamed of it. Never had been. But, waiving all the
extenuating circumstances--which had really surrounded the act--admitting
that it was a sin (this thing that she had done once and had, later,
learned the impossibility of ever doing again), was it any worse than
what her brother had probably done a score of times?

What was this brother of hers going to be like? It wasn't possible, of
course, that she would find him the boy he had been five years ago,
before he went to France--though from some of his letters one might have
though