g.

Sec. 5

Next morning at the office, Walter abruptly asked her to come out into
the hall, told her that he was leaving without notice that afternoon. He
could never bear to delay, once he had started out on the "Long Trail,"
he said, not looking at her. He hastily kissed her, and darted back into
the office. She did not see him again till, at five-thirty, he gave
noisy farewell to all the adoring stenographers and office-boys, and
ironical congratulations to his disapproving chiefs. He stopped at her
desk, hesitated noticeably, then said, "Good-by, Goldie," and passed on.
She stared, hypnotized, as, for the last time, Walter went bouncing out
of the office.

Sec. 6

A week later J. J. Todd called on her again. He was touching in his
description of his faithful labor for the Charity Organization Society.
But she felt dead; she could not get herself to show approval. It was
his last call.

Sec. 7

Walter wrote to her on the train--a jumbled rhapsody on missing her
honest companionship. Then a lively description of his new chief at
Omaha. A lonely letter on a barren evening, saying that there was
nothing to say. A note about a new project of going to Alaska. She did
not hear from him again.

Sec. 8

For weeks she missed him so tragically that she found herself muttering
over and over, "Now I sha'n't ever have a baby that would be a little
image of him."

When she thought of the shy games and silly love-words she had lavished,
she was ashamed, and wondered if they had made her seem a fool to him.

But presently in the week's unchanging routine she found an untroubled
peace; and in mastering her work she had more comfort than ever in his
clamorous summons.

At home she tried not merely to keep her mother from being lonely, but
actually to make her happy, to coax her to break into the formidable
city. She arranged summer-evening picnics with the Sessionses.

She persuaded them to hold one of these picnics at the foot of the
Palisades. During it she disappeared for nearly half an hour. She sat
alone by the river. Suddenly, with a feverish wrench, she bared her
breast, then shook her head angrily, rearranged her blouse, went back to
the group, and was unusually gay, though all the while she kept her left
hand on her breast, as though it pained her.

She had been with the _Gazette_ for only a little over six months, and
she was granted only a week's vacation. This she spent with her mother
at Panama