ard is married?"

Julia felt stunned, and a little sick. She got only the meaning of the
words, their value would come later. But with a desperate effort she
pulled herself together, and smiled with dry lips.

"Yes, I knew that," she said, pleasantly, not meeting Barbara's eye.

"Oh, well, then it's all _right_," Barbara said hastily, relieved. "But
he--he has a teasing sort of way, you know. His wife is in San Diego
now, with her own people."

"Yes, he told me that," Julia said, only longing to escape before a
maddening impulse to cry overpowered her. Barbara saw the truth, and
laid a friendly hand on Julia's arm.

"I just wanted you to know," she said in her kindliest tone.

Suddenly Julia burst out crying, childishly blubbering with her wrists
in her eyes. Barbara, very much distressed, shielded her as well as she
could from the eyes of possible passers-by, and patted her shoulder with
a gloved hand.

"I don't know why--perfectly _crazy_--" gulped Julia, desperately fighting
the sobs that shook her. "And I've had a dreadful headache all day," she
broke out, pitifully, beginning to mop her eyes with a folded
handkerchief, her face still turned away from Barbara.

"Oh, poor thing!" said Barbara. "And the rehearsal must have made it
worse!"

"It's splitting," Julia said sombrely. She gave Barbara one grave,
almost resentful, look, straightened her hat and fluffed up her hair,
and went away. Barbara looked after her, and thought that Carter was a
beast, and that there was something very pitiful about common little
ignorant Miss Page, and that she wouldn't tell the girls about this, and
give them one more cause to laugh at the little actress. For Barbara
Toland was a conscientious girl, and very seriously impressed with the
gravity of her own responsibility toward other people.

Meanwhile Julia walked toward the Mechanics' Library in a very fury of
rage and resentment. She hated the entire caste of "The Amazons," and
she hated Barbara Toland and Carter Hazzard more than the rest! He could
play with her and flirt with her and deceive her, and while she, Julia,
fancied herself envied and admired of the other girls, this delicately
perfumed and exquisitely superior Barbara could be deciding in all
sisterly kindness that she must inform Miss Page of her admirer's real
position. Angry tears came to Julia's eyes, but she went into the
Mechanics' Library and washed the evidences of them away, and made
herself nice to