Meantime Elizabeth had gone to her own room and locked the door.  She hardly knew what to think, her heart was so happy.  Yet beneath it all was the troubled thought of the lady, the haunting lady for whom they had prayed together on the prairie.  And as if to add to the thought she found a bit of newspaper lying on the floor beside her dressing-table.  Marie must have dropped it as she came in to turn up the lights.  It was nothing but the corner torn from a newspaper, and should be consigned to the waste-basket; yet her eye caught the words in large head-lines as she picked it up idly, “Miss Geraldine Loring’s Wedding to Be an Elaborate Affair.”  There was nothing more readable.  The paper was torn in a zigzag line just beneath.  Yet that was enough.  It reminded her of her duty.

Down beside the bed she knelt, and prayed:  “O my Father, hide me now; hide me!  I am in trouble; hide me!” Over and over she prayed till her heart grew calm and she could think.

Then she sat down quietly, and put the matter before her.

This man whom she loved with her whole soul was to be married in a few days.  The world of society would be at the wedding.  He was pledged to another, and he was not hers.  Yet he was her old friend, and was coming to see her.  If he came and looked into her face with those clear eyes of his, he might read in hers that she loved him.  How dreadful that would be!

Yes, she must search yet deeper.  She had heard the glad ring in his voice when he met her, and said, “Elizabeth!” She had seen his eyes.  He was in danger himself.  She knew it; she might not hide it from herself.  She must help him to be true to the woman to whom he was pledged, whom now he would have to marry.

She must go away from it all.  She would run away, now at once.  It seemed that she was always running away from some one.  She would go back to the mountains where she had started.  She was not afraid now of the man from whom she had fled.  Culture and education had done their work.  Religion had set her upon a rock.  She could go back with the protection that her money would put about her, with the companionship of some good, elderly woman, and be safe from harm in that way; but she could not stay here and meet George Benedict in the morning, nor face Geraldine Loring on her wedding-day.  It would be all the same the facing whether she were in the wedding-party or not.  Her days of mourning for her grandmother would of course protect her from this public facing.  It was the thought she could not bear.  She must get away from it all forever.

Her lawyers should arrange the business.  They would purchase the house that Grandmother Brady desired, and then give her her money to build a church.  She would go back, and teach among the lonely wastes of mountain and prairie what Jesus Christ longed to be to the people made in His image.  She would go back and place above the graves of her father and mother and brothers stones that should bear the words of life to all who should pass by in that desolate region.  And that should be her excuse to the world for going, if she needed any excuse—­she had gone to see about placing a monument over her father’s grave.  But the monument should be a church somewhere where it was most needed.  She was resolved upon that.