ple; next, to a restaurant; then, to the boarding-house, where
her few belongings had found their way into a telescope basket; and now
it was conveying them through the bedraggled outskirts of the city into
the country beyond.

A hatchet-faced chauffeur was manipulating things in front; while the
unspeakable man in gray sat unemotionally beside her in the tonneau and
looked the other way.

"What am I to do now?" The bewildered girl found no answer to the one
question of her mind. "Why don't you faint?" she asked herself severely.
"Why don't you faint? If you had an idea of helping me out of this
pickle, you'd do it at once, and never come to at all, and then have
brain fever. It's the only decent solution. Instead of that, here you
are, feeling--actually comfortable."

She stared ahead of her with miserable eyes.

"It was all that miserable beefsteak. The thing must have been six
inches thick. Beast; why couldn't he have taken me to the restaurant
first? Then I'd never have gone to the clergyman's. And that license.
Where did he get it? We never stopped for one--he just pulled it out of
his pocket, as though it had been a handkerchief. Ikey, you're married,
_married_--do you quite understand?--to a man who wears ready-made
clothes and doesn't love you and lives in an attic boarding-house
bed-room. And what is he doing with this automobile? And what is his
business? Oh, he's probably a chauffeur; and he's borrowed his
employer's bubble; and this other chauffeur in front's his best friend
and ashamed of him on account of the beefsteak business. He'd better be.
But what shall I say to him? What shall I _say_?--Oh--h"--heaven-sent
inspiration--"I'll say nothing at all. I will be--so different."

On and on and on went the machine. The girl closed her eyes upon the
dusty, dun-colored landscape.

"Serves me right for turning over my bank account to Cousin Mary
and--and----"

She had fallen asleep, propped up in her corner of the machine--worn out
by this climax to the weeks that had gone before.

The man at her side turned and looked at her. His face no longer wore
its placidly and conventionally polite expression.

IV

"The thirteenth move. Didn't I _say_ it would be unlucky!"

Ikey had fled to the garden, letter in hand, to review the situation.
The low clouds threatened rain. But what did that matter? The house
stifled her with its large, low, mannish rooms and continued reminder of
Arthur Hammond; and she h