very well indeed."

"All right," said Miss Gibbons. "That's settled. There's one more thing
to settle now, and that's where you're going to live."

Rose contemplated this question a little blankly for a moment.

"Do you suppose," she said, "there's any place in this town where I
_can_ live; where they'd take a person like me? Or would it be all
right, if you asked them?"

"Oh, I guess," said Miss Gibbons, "we could most likely find somebody.
I'll think about it."

She gave Rose some work to do and didn't refer to the matter again till
nearly six o'clock.

"I've been thinking," she said then, "that I've got room for a boarder
myself. There's a little room back here that I don't use; there's a
black girl does me out and cooks my dinner and supper, and I get my own
breakfast. The girl could cook for two as well as one, and I guess I
could feed you for two dollars a week. If that ain't satisfactory, you
can just say so."

"Satisfactory!" said Rose, and once more her voice broke.

"All right," said Miss Gibbons hastily, "we'll say no more about it.
That's settled. I'll send the girl to the hotel to get your bags."

John Galbraith's letter asking Rose to report to him July first in New
York, reached her via Portia, during the last week in June, and made an
abrupt conclusion to her life at Centropolis.

Those weeks with Miss Gibbons in the millinery parlor, when she looked
back on them afterward, set in as they were between that purgatorial
winter and the first breathless months while she was establishing
herself in New York, had a quality of happiness and peace, which she was
wont to describe as heavenly.

She'd probably have taken to Miss Gibbons in any circumstance. But,
coming into her life just when she did, the little woman was the shadow
of a great rock to her. She was in a state, when she settled down in the
milliner's spare back room over the drug-store, where all the warmer
emotions seemed terrible to her. It was Rodney's love for her and hers
for him, that had bruised and lacerated her; that had made the winter
months a long torment, unmitigated during the last of them, by any form
of adequate self-expression. The two parodies on love which had been
thrust into her face just at the end, Olga Larson's inverted form of it
toward herself, and Dolly's shabby little romance, had given her an
absolute loathing for it. To her, in that condition, any expression of
friendship that was warm and soft, and in th