n an agony of tenderness.
Every drop of blood appeared to have left her body, which was so pallid
that he seemed to see the light shining through her drawn features.

"So they have been looking for me?" she observed, with but little
interest.

"What did you expect?" he questioned in his turn.

"But I didn't want to be found--I would rather stay lost," she
responded. Shrinking away from him she went to the window and stood
there, pressed closely against the panes, as if in a blind impulse to
put the space of the room between them. "I will not go back even now--I
will not go back," she insisted.

As he entered he had closed the door behind him, and leaning against it
now, he looked at her with a flicker of his quiet smile.

"I'm not talking about going back, am I?" he rejoined. "Heaven knows you
may stay here if you like the place." He glanced quickly about the
crudely furnished little room hung with cheap crayon portraits. "It's
rather hard, though, to fit you into these surroundings," he remarked
with a flash of humour.

She shook her head. "They suit me as well as any other."

"And the people who live here?--What of them?"

"I like them because they are so near to the ground," she answered,
"they've no surface of culture, or personality, or convention to bother
one--they've no surface, indeed, of any kind."

"Well, it's all very interesting," he remarked, smiling, "but, in common
decency, don't you think you might have sent me word?"

"I never thought of you an instant," she replied.

"You never thought of me in your life," he retorted, "and yet when I say
I'm better worth your thinking of than Kemper--God knows I don't pretend
to boast."

A weaker man would have hesitated over the name, but he had seen at the
first glance that the way to save her was not by softness, and his lips,
after he had uttered the word, closed tightly like the lips of a surgeon
who applies the knife.

"Don't speak to me of him!" she cried out sharply, "I had forgotten!"

Her eyes hung upon his in a returning agony, and it was through this
agony alone that he hoped to bring back her consciousness of life.

"This is not the way to forget," he answered, "you are not a coward, yet
you have chosen the cowardly means. There can he no forgetfulness until
you are strong enough to admit the truth to your own heart--to say
'there is no mistake that is final, no wrong done that has power to
crush me.'"

"But there is no truth in my he