ld not even hear her footstep in the hallway outside. Archie dropped
back into his chair and sat motionless for a long while.

So it went; one loved a quaint little girl, cheerful, industrious,
always on the run and hustling through her tasks; and suddenly one lost
her. He had thought he knew that child like the glove on his hand. But
about this tall girl who threw up her head and glittered like that all
over, he knew nothing. She was goaded by desires, ambitions, revulsions
that were dark to him. One thing he knew: the old highroad of life, worn
safe and easy, hugging the sunny slopes, would scarcely hold her again.

After that night Thea could have asked pretty much anything of him. He
could have refused her nothing. Years ago a crafty little bunch of hair
and smiles had shown him what she wanted, and he had promptly married
her. To-night a very different sort of girl--driven wild by doubts and
youth, by poverty and riches--had let him see the fierceness of her
nature. She went out still distraught, not knowing or caring what she
had shown him. But to Archie knowledge of that sort was obligation. Oh,
he was the same old Howard Archie!

That Sunday in July was the turning-point; Thea's peace of mind did not
come back. She found it hard even to practice at home. There was
something in the air there that froze her throat. In the morning, she
walked as far as she could walk. In the hot afternoons she lay on her
bed in her nightgown, planning fiercely. She haunted the post-office.
She must have worn a path in the sidewalk that led to the post-office,
that summer. She was there the moment the mail-sacks came up from the
depot, morning and evening, and while the letters were being sorted and
distributed she paced up and down outside, under the cottonwood trees,
listening to the thump, thump, thump of Mr. Thompson's stamp. She hung
upon any sort of word from Chicago; a card from Bowers, a letter from
Mrs. Harsanyi, from Mr. Larsen, from her landlady,--anything to reassure
her that Chicago was still there. She began to feel the same
restlessness that had tortured her the last spring when she was teaching
in Moonstone. Suppose she never got away again, after all? Suppose one
broke a leg and had to lie in bed at home for weeks, or had pneumonia
and died there. The desert was so big and thirsty; if one's foot
slipped, it could drink one up like a drop of water.

This time, when Thea left Moonstone to go back to Chicago, she w