the curtain on the second act, Leonora and her
husband entered the box. She had forgotten inviting them. She gave
Leonora the chair in front and took the one behind--Millicent Rowland,
whom she herself brought, had the other front seat. As her chair was
midway between the two, she was seeing across Leonora's shoulders.
Presently Dumont came in and took the chair behind Leonora's and leaned
forward, his chin almost touching the slope of her neck as he talked to
her in an undertone, she greatly amused or pretending to be.

The light from the stage fell across Leonora's bosom, fell upon a
magnificent string of graduated pearls clasped with a huge solitaire
beyond question the string the jeweler's clerk had blunderingly shown
her. And there was Dumont's heavy, coarse profile outlined against
Leonora's cheek and throat, her cynical, sensuous profile showing just
beyond.

Open sprang a hundred doors of memory; into Pauline's mind was
discharged avalanche after avalanche of dreadful thoughts. "No! No!"
she protested. "How infamous to think such things of my best friend!"
But she tried in vain to thrust suspicions, accusations, proofs, back
into the closets. Instead, she sank under the flood of them--sick and
certain.

When the lights went up she said: "I'm feeling badly all at once. I'm
afraid I'll have to take you home, Milly."

"Are you ill, dear?" asked Leonora.

"Oh, no--just faint," she replied, in a voice which she succeeded in
making fairly natural.

"Please don't move. Stay on--you really must."

The other man--Shenstone--helped her and Millicent with their wraps and
accompanied them to their carriage. When she had set Millicent down
she drew a long breath of relief. For the first time in seven years
her course lay straight before her. "I must be free!" she said. "I
must be ENTIRELY free--free before the whole world--I and my boy."

The next morning, in the midst of her preparations to take the
ten-o'clock limited for the West, her maid brought a note to her--a
copy of a National Woolens Company circular to the trade, setting forth
that "owing to a gratifying easing in the prices for raw wool, the
Company are able to announce and take great pleasure in announcing a
ten per cent. reduction." On the margin Dumont had scrawled "To go out
to-morrow and to be followed in ten days by fifteen per cent. more.
Couldn't resist your appeal." Thus by the sheer luck that had so often
supplemented his sk