riods of cessation.

She sat in a candy parlor and watched people go by, swarming like bees
along the walk. She remembered having heard or read somewhere the
simile of a human hive. The shuffle of their feet, the hum of their
voices droned in her cars, confusing her, irritating her, and she
presently found herself hurrying away from it, walking rapidly eastward
toward a thin fringe of trees which showed against a distant sky-line
over a sea of roofs. She walked fast, and before long the jar of solid
heels on the concrete pavement bred an ache in her knees. Then she
caught a car passing in that direction, and rode to the end of the
line, where the rails ran out in a wilderness of stumps.

Crossing through these, she found a rudely graded highway, which in
turn dwindled to a mere path. It led her through a pleasant area of
second-growth fir, slender offspring of the slaughtered forest
monarchs, whose great stumps dotted the roll of the land, and up on a
little rise whence she could overlook the city and the inlet where rode
the tall-masted ships and sea-scarred tramps from deep salt water. And
for the time being she was content.

But a spirit of restlessness drove her back into the city. And at
nightfall she went up to her room and threw herself wearily on the bed.
She was tired, body and spirit, and lonely. Nor was this lightened by
the surety that she would be lonelier still before she found a niche to
fit herself in and gather the threads of her life once more into some
orderly pattern.

In the morning she felt better, even to the point of going over the
newspapers and jotting down several advertisements calling for office
help. Her brief experience in Cariboo Meadows had not led her to look
kindly on teaching as a means of livelihood. And stenographers seemed
to be in demand. Wherefore, she reasoned that wages would be high.
With the list in her purse, she went down on Hastings--which runs like
a huge artery through the heart of the city, with lesser streets
crossing and diverging.

But she made no application for employment. For on the corner of
Hastings and Seymour, as she gathered her skirt in her hand to cross
the street, some one caught her by the arm, and cried:

"Well, forevermore, if it isn't Hazel Weir!"

And she turned to find herself facing Loraine Marsh--a Granville school
chum--and Loraine's mother. Back of them, with wide and startled eyes,
loomed Jack Barrow.

He pressed forward w