e up? I know how busy you are so I'll wait until
I hear from you.

"RODNEY."

Her heart felt like lead when she'd read it. Dazedly, a little giddily,
she pulled her door shut, went into her room and sat down.

He was in New York! He'd been to see her this afternoon--and left a
card! And the note he'd written after his second visit was what Howard
West might have written, or any other quite casual, slightly over-polite
acquaintance. And it was from Rodney to her!

She couldn't see him if he felt like that; couldn't stand it to see him
if he felt like that! Bitterness, contempt, hatred, anything would be
easier to bear than that. She was to call up his hotel, was she? Well,
she wouldn't!

And then suddenly she spread the note open again and read it once more.
Turned it over and scrutinized the reverse side of the paper, and
uttered a little sobbing laugh. If he'd been as cool, unmoved,
self-possessed, as that note had tried to sound, would he have forgotten
to tell her at what hotel she was to call him up?

Then, with a gasp, she wondered how she _could_ call him up. He'd think
she knew where he was; he'd wait; and after he'd waited a while, in
default of word from her, wouldn't he take her silence for an answer and
go back to Chicago?

She clenched her hands at that and tried to think. Well, the obvious
thing to do seemed to be the only one. She must try one hotel after
another until she found him. After all, there probably weren't more than
a dozen to choose among. It wouldn't be easy looking up numbers with
everything dancing before her eyes like this, but if she took the
likeliest ones first she mightn't have to go very far. And, indeed, at a
third attempt she found him.

When the telephone girl switched her to the information desk, and the
information clerk said, "Mr. Rodney Aldrich? Just a moment," and then;
"Mr. Aldrich is in fifteen naught five," the dry contraction in her
throat made it impossible for her to speak.

But the switchboard girl had evidently been listening in and plugged her
through, because she heard the throb of another ring, a click of a
receiver and then--then Rodney's voice.

She couldn't answer his first "Hello," and he said it again, sharply,
"Hello, what is it?"

And then suddenly her voice came back. A voice that startled her with
its distinctness. "Hello, Rodney," she said; "this is Rose."

There was a perfectly blank silence after that and, then the crisp voice
of