insisted that she should keep the twenty thousand pounds that had been
given to her absolutely. He may have been influenced in this by his
inability to see from what other funds he could collect his fee.

Eventually he placed her aboard a liner, and her bonds in the purser's
safe; and eventually the liner stole out into the ocean, through such
a gantlet of lurking demons as old superstitions peopled it with.

She had not told the children good-by, but had delivered them to the
Oakbys and run away. The Oakbys had received her with a coldness that
startled her. They used the expression, "Under the circumstances,"
with a freezing implication that made her wonder if the secret had
already trickled through to them.

On the steamer there was nobody she knew. At the dock no friends
greeted her. She did not notice that her arrival was noted by a
certain Mr. Larrey, who had been detailed to watch her and saw with
some pride how pretty she was. "It'll be a pleasure to keep an eye on
her," he told a luckless colleague who had a long-haired pacifist
professor allotted to him. But Marie Louise's mystic squire had not
counted on her stopping in New York for only a day and then setting
forth on a long, hot, stupid train-ride of two days to the little town
of her birth, Wakefield.

Larrey found it appalling. Marie Louise found it far smaller and
shabbier than she had imagined. Yet it had grown some, too, since her
time.

At least, most of the people she had known had moved away to the
cities or the cemeteries, and new people had taken their place. She
had not known many of the better people. Her mother had been too
humble to sew for them.

Coming from London and the country life of England, she found the town
intolerably ugly. It held no associations for her. She had been
unhappy there, and she said: "Poor me! No wonder I ran away." She
justified her earlier self with a kind of mothering sympathy. She
longed for some one to mother her present self.

But her sister was not to be found. The old house where they had lived
was replaced by a factory that had made suspenders and now was turning
out cartridge-belts. She found no one who knew her sister at all. She
did not give her own name, for many reasons, and her face was not
remembered. A few people recalled the family. The town marshal vaguely
placed her father as a frequent boarder at the jail.

One sweet old lady, for whom Marie Louise's mother had done sewing,
had a kind of