passengers other than natives of the Island.

On the mainland she caught an accommodation train which wound a
halting way through the morning and set her down in Providence late in
the forenoon. Then ignorance of railroad travel made her choose
another accommodation instead of an express which would have cost no
more and landed her in New York an hour earlier.

Her flight was financed by a few dollars left over from her bridge
winnings of the first day at Gosnold House after subsequent losses had
been paid. Their sum no more than sufficed; when she had purchased a
meagre lunch at the station counter in New Haven she was penniless
again; but for the clothes she wore she landed in New York even as she
had left it.

The city received her with a deafening roar that seemed of exultation
that its prey had been delivered unto it again.

The heat was even more oppressive than that of the day on which she
had left--or perhaps seemed so by contrast with the radiant coolness
of the Island air.

Avoiding Park Avenue, she sought the place that she called home by way
of Lexington.

She went slowly, wearily, lugging her half-empty hand-hag as if it
were a heavy burden.

At length, leaving the avenue, she paused a few doors west of the
corner, climbed the weather-bitten steps to the brownstone entrance,
and addressed herself to those three long flights of naked stairs.

The studio door at the top was closed and locked. The card had been
torn from the tacks that held it to the panel.

Puzzled and anxious, she stopped and turned up a corner of the worn
fibre mat--and sighed with relief to find the key in its traditional
hiding-place.

But when she let herself in, it was to a room tenanted solely by seven
howling devils of desolation.

Only the decrepit furniture remained; it had not been worth cartage or
storage; every personal belonging of the other two girls had
disappeared; Mary Warden had not left so much as a sheet of music,
Lucy Spade had overlooked not so much as a hopeless sketch.

Yet Sally had no cause for complaint; they had forsaken her less
indifferently than she had them; one or the other had left a
newspaper, now three days old, propped up where she could not fail to
see it on the antiquated marble mantel-shelf. In separate
columns on the page folded outermost two items were encircled with
rings of crimson water-colour.

One, under the caption "News of Plays and Players," noted the
departure for an openin