r Studio the faint possibility of a job.
She was already thinking in the terms that went with the old gray rag
and the battered hat, and had come back to them as to her
mother-tongue. In forsaking paradise for the limbo of outcast souls
she was at least supported by the fact that in the limbo of outcast
souls she was at home.

She was not frightened. Now that she was out of the prince's palace
she had suddenly become sensationless. She was like a soul which
having reached the other side of death is conscious only of release
from pain. She was no longer walking on blades; she was no longer
attempting the impossible. Between her and the life which Barbara
Walbrook understood the few steps she had taken had already marked the
gulf. The gulf had always been there, yawning, unbridgeable, only that
she, Letty Gravely, had tried to shut her eyes to it. She had tried to
shut her eyes to it in the hope that the man she loved might come to
do the same. She knew now how utterly foolish any such hope had been.

She would have perceived this earlier had he not from time to time
revived the hope when it was about to flicker out. More than once he
had confessed to depending on her sympathy. More than once he had told
her that she drew out something he had hardly dared think he
possessed, but which made him more of a man. Once he harked back to
the dust flower, saying that as its humble and heavenly bloom
brightened the spots bereft of beauty so she cheered the lonely and
comfortless places in his heart. He had said these things not as one
who is in love, but as one who is grateful, only that between
gratitude and love she had purposely kept from drawing the
distinction.

She did not reproach him. On the contrary, she blessed him even for
being grateful. That meed he gave her at least, and that he should
give her anything at all was happiness. Leaving his palace she did so
with nothing but grateful thoughts on her own side. He had smiled on
her always; he had been considerate, kindly, and very nearly tender.
For what he called the wrong he had done her, which she held to be no
wrong at all, he would have made amends so magnificent that the mere
acceptance would have overwhelmed her. Since he couldn't give her the
one thing she craved her best course was like the little mermaid to
tremble into foam, and become a spirit of the wind.

It was what she was doing. She was going without leaving a trace. A
girl more important than she cou