He pressed her with his questions, for his discernment told him that it was of no use, while they were flying along the road at this pace, with a hamper at their feet—­or at his feet, crowding him rather uncomfortably and forcing him to sit with cramped legs—­no use for him to talk of the subject uppermost in his anxious mind.  So he got from her, as well as he could, the story of the year, and presently had her telling him eagerly of the people she had met, and the progress she had made in the study of human beings.  It was really an engrossing tale, quietly as she told it, and many as were the details he saw that she kept back.

“I found out one thing very early,” she said.  “I knew that I could never come back and live as I had lived before, with no thought of any one but myself.”

“I don’t believe you had ever done that.”

“I had—­I had, if ever any one did.  I went away to school in Paris for two years; I wouldn’t go to college—­how I wish I had!  I was the gayest, most thoughtless girl you ever knew until—­the thing happened that sent my world spinning upside down.  Why, Mr. King, I was so selfish and so thoughtless that I could turn that poor girl away from my door with a careless denial, and never see that she was desperate—­that it wanted only one more such turning away to make her do the thing she did.”

He saw her press her lips together, her eyes fixed on the road ahead, and he saw the beautiful brows contract, as if the memory still were too keen for her to bear calmly.

“You have certainly atoned a hundred times over,” he said gently, “for any carelessness in the past.  How could you know how she was feeling?  And she was insane, Miss Stockton said.”

“No more insane than I am now—­simply desperate with weariness and failure.  And I should have seen; I did see.  I just—­didn’t care.  I was busy trying on a box of new frocks from a French dressmaker, frocks of silk and lace—­of silk and lace, Jordan King, while she hadn’t clothes enough to keep her warm!  And I couldn’t spare the time to look at the girl’s book!  Well, I learned what it was to have people turn me from their doors—­I, with plenty of money at my command, no matter how I elected to dress cheaply and go to cheap boarding places, and—­insist on cheap beds at hospitals.”  Her tone was full of scorn.  “After all, did I ever really suffer anything of what she suffered?  Never, for always I knew that at any minute I could turn from a poor girl into a rich one, throw my book in the faces of those who refused to buy it, and telephone my anxious family.  They did come on and try to get me away—­once.  I went with them—­for the day.  It was the day you met me.  And always there was the interest of the adventure.  It was an adventure, you know, a big one.”

“I should say it was.  And when you were at the hospital—­”

“Accepting expensive rooms and free medical attendance—­oh, wasn’t I a fraud?  How I felt it I can never tell you.  But I could—­and did—­send back Doctor Burns a draft in part payment, though I thought he would never imagine where it came from.  He did, though.  What do you suppose he told me last night when we were driving home?—­this morning it was, of course.”