hich she
didn't want to be haunted.

"I couldn't do it with this on," she said of the plain gold band on
her finger, to which, as a symbol of marriage, she had never attached
significance in any case.

She took it off, therefore, and laid it on the dressing table.

"I couldn't do it with this in my pocket," she said of the purse
containing a few dollars, with which Steptoe had kept her supplied.

This too she laid on the dressing table, becoming as penniless as when
Judson Flack had put her out of doors. Somehow, to be penniless seemed
to her an element in her new task, and an excuse for it.

Since Allerton had never made her a present there was nothing of this
kind to discard. It had been part of his non-committal, impersonal
attitude toward her that he had never given her a concrete sign that
she meant anything to him whatever. He had thanked her on occasions
for the comforting quality he found in her presence. He had, in so
many words, recognized the fact that when he got into a tantrum of
nerves she could bring him out of it as no one else had ever done. He
had also imparted to her the discovery that in reading to her, and
trying to show her the point of view of a life superior to her own, he
had for the first time in his life done something for someone else;
but he had never gone beyond all this or allowed her to think that his
heart was not given to "the girl he was engaged to." In that at least
he had been loyal to the mysterious princess, as the little mermaid
could not but see.

She was not consciously denuded, as she would have felt herself six
months earlier. As to that she was not thinking anything at all. Her
motive, in setting free the prince from the "drag" on him which she
now recognized herself to be, filled all her mental horizons. So
dominated was she by this overwhelming impulse as to have no thought
even for self-pity.

When a clock somewhere struck one she took it as the summons. From the
dressing-table she picked up the scrawl in Steptoe's hand, giving the
name of Miss Henrietta Towell, at an address at Red Point, L. I. She
knew Red Point, on the tip of Long Island, as a distant, partially
developed suburb of Brooklyn. In the previous year she had gone with a
half dozen other girl "supes" from the Excelsior Studio to "blow in" a
quarter looking at the ocean steamers passing in and out. She had no
intention of intruding on Miss Towell, but she couldn't hurt Steptoe's
feelings by leaving th