peaker, a wish became a desire, or a dream, half
dead, flared suddenly into life. For the most part the
words came from the woman and she said them without
looking at the man.

Each time she came to see the doctor the hotel keeper's
wife talked a little more freely and after an hour or
two in his presence went down the stairway into Main
Street feeling renewed and strengthened against the
dullness of her days. With something approaching a
girlhood swing to her body she walked along, but when
she had got back to her chair by the window of her room
and when darkness had come on and a girl from the hotel
dining room brought her dinner on a tray, she let it
grow cold. Her thoughts ran away to her girlhood with
its passionate longing for adventure and she remembered
the arms of men that had held her when adventure was a
possible thing for her. Particularly she remembered one
who had for a time been her lover and who in the moment
of his passion had cried out to her more than a hundred
times, saying the same words madly over and over: "You
dear! You dear! You lovely dear!" The words, she
thought, expressed something she would have liked to
have achieved in life.

In her room in the shabby old hotel the sick wife of
the hotel keeper began to weep and, putting her hands
to her face, rocked back and forth. The words of her
one friend, Doctor Reefy, rang in her ears. "Love is
like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black
night," he had said. "You must not try to make love
definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try
to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath
the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot
day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust
from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made
tender by kisses."

Elizabeth Willard could not remember her mother who had
died when she was but five years old. Her girlhood had
been lived in the most haphazard manner imaginable. Her
father was a man who had wanted to be let alone and the
affairs of the hotel would not let him alone. He also
had lived and died a sick man. Every day he arose with
a cheerful face, but by ten o'clock in the morning all
the joy had gone out of his heart. When a guest
complained of the fare in the hotel dining room or one
of the girls who made up the beds got married and went
away, he stamped on the floor and swore. At night when
he went to bed he thought of his daughter growing up
among