d tried the
air. It proved to be that of Ninth Street; and was indeed remarkably
dry. This visit to Margaret was her second one; six months before she
had made a long stay at East Angels--so long that Aunt Katrina began to
fear that she would never go away. The violence of the grief that had
accompanied her first return to Gracias had subsided with singular
suddenness; she said to Margaret, in an apathetic tone, "I had to kill
it, you know, or else kill myself. I came very near killing myself."

"I was much alarmed about you," Margaret answered, hesitating as to
whether or not to say more.

Garda divined her thoughts. "Did you think I was out of my mind? I
wasn't at all; it was only that I couldn't bear the pain. Let us never
speak of that time again--never! never!" She got up, and for a moment
stood trembling and quivering. Then, with the same rapidity and
completeness, she resumed her calm.

Margaret never did speak of it again. "But how was it that she killed
it--how?" was her dreary thought.

During that first visit, Lanse and Mrs. Spenser had become fast friends;
every evening she played checkers with him, and she was the only person
with whom he did not bluster over the game; she contradicted him; she
made sport of his fish-nets; she used his Fielding for her footstool;
she put forward the proposition that her own face was prettier than his
Mino outlines.

Lanse denied this. "My Mino outlines are not in the least pretty. But
then you are not in the least pretty yourself."

"Not pretty!" said Garda, with a protesting cry. "Why, even a little
pussy cat can be pretty."

"I have not been able to discover a trace of prettiness in you." He
paused. "You are simply superb," he said, looking at her with his deep
bold eyes. "What makes you stay on here?" he added in another tone,
surveying her curiously.

Garda turned; but Margaret had by chance left the room. "I was going to
point to Margaret," she answered; "I stay because I love her--love to be
with her."

"Well, you'll have a career," Lanse announced, briefly.

The next day he said to Aunt Katrina, "I should like to have seen that
girl before she was married; there's such an extraordinary richness in
her beauty that I don't believe she ever had an awkward age; she was
probably graceful at sixteen."

"She was designing at sixteen."

"No! For whom could she have been designing down here?"

"Evert."

"And the idiot let her slip through his fingers?"

"