ness of a friend to help--not
alone for the need's sake, but for hers.

Dosia tried to picture Eugene Larue as Lois must see him; his bearded
lips, his worn forehead, his quiet, sad, piercing eyes, were not
attractive to her. The whole thing was very bewildering.

It was twenty miles, a forty-minute ride, to Haledon, where they changed
cars for the little branch road that went past Collingswood--a signal
station, as the conductor who punched their tickets impressed on Lois.
Haledon itself was a junction for many lines, with a crowd of people on
the platform continually coming and going under the electric lights. As
Lois and Dosia waited for their train, an automobile dashed up, and a
man and a woman, getting out of it with wraps and bundles, took their
place among those who were waiting for the west-bound express. The
woman, large and elegantly gowned, had something familiar in her outline
as she turned to her companion, a short, ferret-faced man with a fair
mustache--the man who lately had been seen everywhere with Mrs.
Leverich. Yes, it was Mrs. Leverich. Dosia shrank back into the shadow.
The light struck full athwart the large, full-blown face of Myra as she
turned to the man caressingly with some remark; his eyes, evilly
cognizant, smiled back again as he answered, with his cigar between his
teeth.

Dosia felt that old sensation of burning shame--she had seen something
that should have been hidden in darkness. They were going off together!
All those whispers about Mrs. Leverich had been true.

There were only a few people in the shaky, rattly little car when Lois
and Dosia entered it, whizzing off, a moment later, down a lonely road
with wooded hills sloping to the track on one side and a wooded brook on
the other. The air grew aromatic in the chill spring dusk with the odor
of damp fern and pine. Both women were silent, and the baby, rolled in
his long cloak, had slept all the way. It was but seven miles to
Collingswood, yet the time seemed longer than all the rest of the
journey before they were finally dumped out at the little empty station
with the hills towering above it. A youth was just locking up the
ticket-office and going off as they reached it. Dosia ran after him.

"Mr. Larue's place is near here, isn't it?" she called.

"Yes, over there to the right," said the youth, pointing down the board
walk, which seemed to end at nowhere, "about a quarter of a mile down.
You'll know when you come to the gat