Oh, Duane!  I came on him just at the edge of evening, and he winded me and went thundering down the Westgate ravine, and I fired too quickly.

“But I’m after him almost every day with old Miller, and my arms and legs are getting so strong, and my flesh so firm, and actually I’m becoming almost plump in the face!  Don’t you care for that kind of a girl?

“Dear, do you think I’ve passed the danger mark?  Tell me honestly—­not what you want to think, but what you do believe.  I don’t know whether I have passed it yet.  I feel, somehow, whichever side of it I am on, that the danger mark is not very far away from me.  I’ve got to get farther away.  The house in town is open.  Mrs. Farren, Hilda, and Nellie are there if we run into town.

“Kathleen is so happy for me.  I’ve told her about the red cross.  She is too sweet to Scott; she seems to think he really grieves deeply over the loss of his private fortune.  What a dear she is!  She is willing to marry him now; but Scott strikes attitudes and declares she shall have a man whose name stands for an achievement—­meaning, of course, the Seagrave process for the extermination of the Rose-beetle.

    “Duane, I am quite unaccountably happy to-day.  Nothing seems to
    threaten.  But don’t stop loving me.”

Followed three letters less confident, and another very pitiful—­a frightened letter asking him to come if he could.  But his father’s condition forbade it and he dared not.

Then another letter came, desperate, almost incoherent, yet still bearing the red cross faintly traced.  And on the heels of it a telegram: 

“Could you stand by me until this is over?  I am afraid of to-night. 
Am on my way to town with my maid, very ill.  I know you cannot
leave your father except at night.  I will telephone you from the
house. 

          
                                                                                                  “G.S.”

On the train a dispatch was handed her: 

“I will be at your house as soon as my father is asleep.  Don’t
worry. 
“DUANE.”

Hour after hour she sat motionless beside the car-window, quiet, pale, dark eyes remote; trees, houses, trains, telegraph-poles streamed past in one gray, unending blur; rain which at first had only streaked the grimy window-glass with cinders, became sleet, then snow, clotting the dripping panes.

At last, far away under a heavy sky, the vast misshapen landmarks of New York loomed up gray through the falling snow; the train roared over the Harlem, halted at 125th Street, rolled on into the black tunnel, faster, faster, slower, then more slowly, and stopped.  All sounds ceased at the same moment; silence surrounded her, dreary as the ominous silence within.