o the night she had
fled in the proa, a clear sustained narrative. And through it all,
like a golden thread on a piece of tapestry, weaving in and out of
the patterns, the unspoken longing for love.

"Well," she said, as they reached the hotel portal, "what is your
advice?"

"Would you follow it?"

"Probably not. Still, I am curious."

"I do not say that what you have done is wrong in any sense. I do
not blame you for the act. There are human limitations, and no
doubt you reached yours. For all that, it is folly. If you knew
your aunt were alive, if she expected you, that would be different.
But to plunge blindly into the unknown!"

"I had to! I had to!"

She had told him only the first part of her story. She wondered if
the second part would overcome his objections? Several times the
words had rushed to her tongue, to find her tongue paralysed. To a
woman she might have confided; but to this man, kindly as he was,
it was unthinkable. How could she tell him of the evil that drew
her and drew her, as a needle to the magnet?--the fascinating evil
that even now, escaped as it was, went on distilling its poison in
her mind?

"Yes, yes!" said the doctor. "But if you do not find this aunt,
what will you do? What can you do to protect yourself against
hunger?"

"I'll find something."

"But warn the aunt, prepare her, if she lives."

"And have her warn my father! No. If I surprised her, if I saw her
alone, I might make her understand."

He shook his head. "There's only one way out of the muddle, that I
can see."

"And what is that?"

"I have relatives not far from Hartford. I may prevail upon them to
take you in until you are full-fledged, providing you do not find
this aunt. You say you have twenty-four hundred in your letter of
credit. It will not cost you more than six hundred to reach your
destination. The pearls were really yours?"

"They were left to me by my mother. I sometimes laid away my
father's clothes in his trunk. I saw the metal box a hundred times,
but I never thought of opening it until the day I fled. I never
even burrowed down into the trunk. I had no curiosity of that kind.
I wanted something _alive_." She paused.

"Go on."

"Well, suddenly I knew that I must see the inside of that box,
which had a padlock. I wrenched this off, and in an envelope
addressed to me in faded ink, I found the locket and the pearls. It
is queer how ideas pop into one's head. Instantly I knew that I was
go