amused curl. "Of course Leila
would. She--chatters. But she's a dear girl; it's just that she can't
easily get a new point of view."

He pressed her with his questions, for his discernment told him that it
was of no use, while they were flying along the road at this pace, with
a hamper at their feet--or at his feet, crowding him rather
uncomfortably and forcing him to sit with cramped legs--no use for him
to talk of the subject uppermost in his anxious mind. So he got from
her, as well as he could, the story of the year, and presently had her
telling him eagerly of the people she had met, and the progress she had
made in the study of human beings. It was really an engrossing tale,
quietly as she told it, and many as were the details he saw that she
kept back.

"I found out one thing very early," she said. "I knew that I could never
come back and live as I had lived before, with no thought of any one but
myself."

"I don't believe you had ever done that."

"I had--I had, if ever any one did. I went away to school in Paris for
two years; I wouldn't go to college--how I wish I had! I was the gayest,
most thoughtless girl you ever knew until--the thing happened that sent
my world spinning upside down. Why, Mr. King, I was so selfish and so
thoughtless that I could turn that poor girl away from my door with a
careless denial, and never see that she was desperate--that it wanted
only one more such turning away to make her do the thing she did."

He saw her press her lips together, her eyes fixed on the road ahead,
and he saw the beautiful brows contract, as if the memory still were
too keen for her to bear calmly.

"You have certainly atoned a hundred times over," he said gently, "for
any carelessness in the past. How could you know how she was feeling?
And she was insane, Miss Stockton said."

"No more insane than I am now--simply desperate with weariness and
failure. And I should have seen; I did see. I just--didn't care. I was
busy trying on a box of new frocks from a French dressmaker, frocks of
silk and lace--of silk and lace, Jordan King, while she hadn't clothes
enough to keep her warm! And I couldn't spare the time to look at the
girl's book! Well, I learned what it was to have people turn me from
their doors--I, with plenty of money at my command, no matter how I
elected to dress cheaply and go to cheap boarding places, and--insist on
cheap beds at hospitals." Her tone was full of scorn. "After all, did I
e