n her strained voice said: "Take me home, please," he started and
the fear that had been on her face was now on his. A hundred dangers,
of which she did not dream, stood between that room and a safe exit in
which she should not be seen, and that much of this wretched
business--which he understood now only too well--miscarry.

He started for the door. "Stay here," he said. "You are perfectly
safe," and he went out, and closed and locked the door behind him.

For the man who plotted without, and the woman who sat like a stone
within that room, the next half hour were equally horrible. But time
was no longer measured by her!

She never remembered much more of that evening. She had a vague
recollection that he came back. She had a remembrance that he had
helped her stand--given her a glass of water--and led her down the
uncarpeted stairs out into the street. Then she was conscious that she
walked a little way. Then that she had been helped into a carriage,
and then she had jolted and jolted and jolted over the pavings, always
with his pale face opposite, and she knew that his eyes were full of
pity. Then everything seemed to stop, but it was only the carriage
that had come to a standstill. She was in front of her own door.

A voice said in her ear, "Can you stand?" And she knew she was on the
steps. She heard the bell ring, but before her mother could catch her
in her arms as she fell, she heard the carriage door bang, and he was
gone forever.

All that night she lay and tossed and wept and raved, and longed in
her fever to die.

And all night, he walked the streets marvelling at himself, at Nature,
and at Civilization, between which he had so disastrously fallen, and
wondering to how many men the irremediable had ever happened before.

And the next morning, early, messengers were flying about with notices
of the bride's illness.--Miss Moreland's wedding was deferred by brain
fever.

When she recovered, her hair was white, and she had lost all taste for
matrimony, but she had found instead that desire for anything rather
than personal existence, which made her the ardent, self-abnegating
worker for the welfare of the downtrodden that the world knew her.

* * * * *

There was a moment of surprised silence.

Some one coughed. No one laughed. Then the Journalist, always ready
to leap into a breach, gasped: "Horrible!"

"Getting to be a pet word of yours," said the Lawyer.

The Vio