Really I can't thank
you enough. And I'll never forget it."

"Will you write me how you are getting along?" asked Carley, offering
her hand.

"Yes."

Carley moved with him out into the hall and to the door. There was
a question she wanted to ask, but found it strangely difficult of
utterance. At the door Burton fixed a rather penetrating gaze upon her.

"You didn't ask me about Rust," he said.

"No, I--I didn't think of him--until now, in fact," Carley lied.

"Of course then you couldn't have heard about him. I was wondering."

"I have heard nothing."

"It was Rust who told me to come to you," said Burton. "We were talking
one day, and he--well, he thought you were true blue. He said he knew
you'd trust me and lend me money. I couldn't have asked you but for
him."

"True blue! He believed that. I'm glad.... Has he spoken of me to you
since I was last at the hospital?"

"Hardly," replied Burton, with the straight, strange glance on her
again.

Carley met this glance and suddenly a coldness seemed to envelop her.
It did not seem to come from within though her heart stopped beating.
Burton had not changed--the warmth, the gratitude still lingered about
him. But the light of his eyes! Carley had seen it in Glenn's, in
Rust's--a strange, questioning, far-off light, infinitely aloof and
unutterably sad. Then there came a lift of her heart that released
a pang. She whispered with dread, with a tremor, with an instinct of
calamity.

"How about--Rust?"

"He's dead."

The winter came, with its bleak sea winds and cold rains and blizzards
of snow. Carley did not go South. She read and brooded, and gradually
avoided all save those true friends who tolerated her.

She went to the theater a good deal, showing preference for the drama
of strife, and she did not go anywhere for amusement. Distraction
and amusement seemed to be dead issues for her. But she could become
absorbed in any argument on the good or evil of the present day.
Socialism reached into her mind, to be rejected. She had never
understood it clearly, but it seemed to her a state of mind where
dissatisfied men and women wanted to share what harder working or
more gifted people possessed. There were a few who had too much of
the world's goods and many who had too little. A readjustment of such
inequality and injustice must come, but Carley did not see the remedy in
Socialism.

She devoured books on the war with a morbid curiosity and hope that sh