departure, Jeanette stooped to pick up what Molly
had left. She saw her own name, "Jeanette Barclay," and her address
written on an envelope. She picked it up. It was dated: "Written
December 28," and she saw that the package was filled with letters in
envelopes similarly addressed in Neal Ward's handwriting. She dropped
the letter on her dressing-table and began to undo her hair. In a few
minutes she stopped and picked up another, and laid it down unopened.
But in half an hour she was sitting on the floor reading the letters
through her tears. The flood of joy that came over her drowned her
pride. For an hour she sat reading the letters, and they brought her
so near to her lover that it seemed that she must reach out and touch
him. She was drawn by an irresistible impulse to her telephone that
sat on her desk. It seemed crazy to expect to reach Neal Ward at
midnight, but as she rose from the floor with the letters slipping
from her lap and with the impulse like a cord drawing her, she saw, or
thought she saw, standing by the desk, a part of the fluttering
shadows, a girl--a quaint, old-fashioned girl in her teens,
with--but then she remembered the dream girl her lover had described
in the letter she had just been reading, and she understood the source
of her delusion. And yet there the vision moved by the telephone,
smiling and beckoning; then it faded, and there came rushing back to
her memory a host of recollections of her childhood, and of some one
she could not place, and then a memory of danger,--and then it was
all gone and there stood the desk and the telephone and the room as it
was.

She shuddered slightly, and then remembered that she had just been
through two great nervous experiences--the story of her father's
changed life, and the return of her lover. And she was a level-headed,
strong-nerved girl. So the joy of love in her heart was not dampened,
and the cord drawing her to the desk in the window did not loosen, and
she did not resist. With a gulp of nervous fear she rang the telephone
bell and called, "54, please!" She heard a buzzing, and then a faint
stir in the receiver, and then she got the answer. She sat a-tremble,
afraid to reply. The call was repeated in her ear, and then she said
so faintly that she could not believe it would be heard, "Oh,
Neal--Neal--I have come back."

The young man standing in the dimly lighted hall was startled. He
cried, "Is it really you, Jeanette--is it you?"

And th