ate degree somebody whom he had once known.

But mostly she was preoccupied with pondering the strangeness of it, that
he who seemed so brilliant and brave a figure of the great world should,
according to his own confession, have risen from beginnings as lowly as her
own. All that he had suffered in the days of his youth, in that place in
Paris which he called Troyon's, Sofia had suffered here and in large part
continued to suffer without prospect of alleviation or hope of escape. And
remembering what he had said, that his own trials had come to an end only
when he awakened to the fact that he was, as he had put it, "less than half
alive" there at Troyon's, and had simply "walked out into life," she was
persuaded that the cure for her own discomfort and discontent would never
be found in any other way. But she lacked courage to adventure it.

To say "walk out and make an end of it" was all very well; but assuming
that she ever should muster up spirit enough to do it--what then? Which way
should she turn, once she had passed out through the doors? What could she
do? She had neither means nor friends, and she was much too thoroughly
conversant with the common way of the world with a woman alone to imagine
that, by taking her life in her own hands, she would accomplish much more
than exchange the irk of the frying pan for the fury of the fire.

All the same, she knew that she must one day do it and chance the
consequences. Things couldn't go on as they were.

And even granting that the outcome of any effort at self-assertion must be
unhappy, she grew impatient.

Meanwhile, she did nothing, she sat quietly on her perch, looked with stony
composure over the heads of the multitude, indifferent alike to admiration
and the uncharitable esteem of her own sex, and waited with a burning
heart.

Mr. Karslake ran true to form. He drifted in and out casually, always idle
and degage and elegant, he continued his irregular conferences with
ill-assorted companions, he worshipped discreetly and evidently without the
faintest hope, he seemed more than ever a trifling and immaterial creature.
Chance did not again lead him to the table where he had sat with the man
whom Sofia could not forget, and only the memory of that conversation held
any place for Karslake in the consideration of the girl.

Even at that she didn't consider him seriously, she looked for him and
missed him when he didn't appear solely because of a secret hope that s