fault."

And all at once, without knowing how or why, she found that she had
written, sealed, stamped, and addressed a note to Harold Vickers
declining his story.

But this was a long way from actually rejecting "The Last
Dryad"--rejecting it in favor of "Patroclus." She had only written the
note, so she told herself, just to see how the words would look. It was
merely an impulse; would come to nothing, of course. Let us put it
aside, that note, and seriously consider this trying situation.

Somehow it seemed less trying now; somehow the fact of her distress
seemed less poignant. There was a way out of it--stop. No; do not look
at the note there on the table. There was a way out, no doubt, but not
that one; no, of course not that one. Rosella laughed a little. How
easily some one else, less scrupulous, would solve this problem! Well,
she could solve it, too, and keep her scruples as well; but not tonight.
Now she was worn out. Tomorrow it would look different to her.

She went to bed and tossed wide-eyed and wakeful till morning, then
rose, and after breakfast prepared to go to the office as usual. The
manuscript of "The Last Dryad" lay on her table, and while she was
wrapping it up her eye fell upon the note to Harold Vickers.

"Why," she murmured, with a little grimace of astonishment--"why, how is
this? I thought I burned that last night. How _could_ I have
forgotten!"

She could have burned it then. The fire was crackling in the grate; she
had but to toss it in. But she preferred to delay.

"I will drop it in some ash-can or down some sewer on the way to the
office," she said to herself. She slipped it into her muff and hurried
away. But on the way to the cable-car no ash-can presented itself. True,
she discovered the opening of a sewer on the corner where she took her
car. But a milkman and a police officer stood near at hand in
conversation, occasionally glancing at her, and no doubt they would have
thought it strange to see this well-dressed young woman furtively
dropping a sealed letter into a sewer-vent.

She held it awkwardly in her hand all of her way down-town, and still
carried it there when she had descended from her car and took her way up
the cross-street toward Conant's.

She suddenly remembered that she had other letters to mail that morning.
For two days the weekly epistles that she wrote home to her mother and
younger sister had been overlooked in her pocket. She found a mail-box
on the c