eleven o'clock, and Rose's might be. Aunt Kate was there, and
she and Rose might well be sitting up, with the restless smaller baby,
or to finish some bit of sewing.

It was a double house, and the windows that matched Rose's bedroom and
dining-room were lighted in the wrong half. But all Rose's side was
black and dark and silent.

Norma, for the first time in her life, needed courage for the knocking
and ringing and explaining. If they would surely be kind to her, she
might chance it, she thought. But if Aunt Kate was angry with her
vacillations in regard to Wolf, and if Rose had also taken Wolf's side,
then she knew that she, Norma, would begin to cry, and disgrace herself,
and have good-natured simple old Harry poking about and wondering what
was the matter----

No, she didn't dare risk it. So she waited in the little garden, looking
up at the windows, praying that little Harry would wake up, or that the
baby's little acid wail would drift through the open window, and then
the dim light bloom suddenly, and show a silhouette of Rose, tall and
sweet in her wrapper, with a great rope of braid falling over one
shoulder.

But moments went by, and there was no sound. Norma went to the street
lamp a hundred feet away and looked at her wrist watch. Quarter past
eleven; it was useless to wait any longer; it had been a senseless quest
from the beginning.

She went back to the city by train and boat, crying desolately in the
darkness above the ploughing of the invisible waters. She cried with
pity for herself, for it seemed to her that life was very unfair to her.

"Is it _my_ fault that I inherit all that money?" she asked the dark
night angrily. "Is it my fault that I love Chris Liggett? Isn't it
better to be honest about it than live with a man I don't love? Isn't
that the worst thing that woman can endure--a loveless marriage?

"But that's just the High School Debating Society!" she interrupted
herself, suddenly, using a phrase that she and Wolf had coined long ago
for glib argument that is untouched by actual knowledge of life.
"Loveless marriage--and wife in name only! I wonder if I am getting to
be one of the women who throw those terms about as an excuse for just
sheer selfishness and stupidity!"

And her aunt's phrases came back to her, making her wonder unhappily
just where the trouble lay, just what sort of a woman she was.

"I think you will be whatever you want to be, Norma," Mrs. Sheridan had
said, "you