With an expression of despair on my features, I left the store, carrying the Frame under my arm.

One thing is certain.  I must see the play again, and judge it with a criticle eye.  If it is worth saving, it must be saved.

January 16th.  Is it only a day since I saw you, Dear Dairy?  Can so much have happened in the single lapse of a few hours?  I look in my mirror, and I look much as before, only with perhaps a touch of paller.  Who would not be pale?

I have seen him again, and there is no longer any doubt in my heart.  Page Beresford is atractive, and if it were not for circumstances as they are I would not anser for the consequences.  But things are as they are.  There is no changing that.  And I have reid my own heart.

I am not fickel.  On the contrary, I am true as steal.

I have put his Picture under my mattress, and have given Jane my gold cuff pins to say nothing when she makes my bed.  And now, with the house full of People downstairs acting in a flippent and noisy maner, I shall record how it all happened.

My finantial condition was not improved this morning, father having not returned.  But I knew that I must see the Play, as mentioned above, even if it became necesary to borow from Hannah.  At last, seeing no other way, I tried this, but failed.

“What for?” she said, in a suspicous way.

“I need it terrably, Hannah,” I said.

“You’d ought to get it from your mother, then, Miss Barbara.  The last time I gave you some you paid it back in postage stamps, and I haven’t written a letter since.  They’re all stuck together now, and a totle loss.”

“Very well,” I said, fridgidly.  “But the next time you break anything——­”

“How much do you want?” she asked.

I took a quick look at her, and I saw at once that she had desided to lend it to me and then run and tell mother, beginning, “I think you’d ought to know, Mrs. Archibald——­”

“Nothing doing, Hannah,” I said, in a most dignafied manner.  “But I think you are an old Clam, and I don’t mind saying so.”

I was now thrown on my own resourses, and very bitter.  I seemed to have no Friends, at a time when I needed them most, when I was, as one may say, “standing with reluctent feet, where the brook and river meet.”

Tonight I am no longer sick of Life, as I was then.  My throws of anguish have departed.  But I was then uterly reckless, and even considered running away and going on the stage myself.

I have long desired a Career for mvself, anyhow.  I have a good mind, and learn easily, and I am not a Paracite.  The idea of being such has always been repugnent to me, while the idea of a few dollars at a time doaled out to one of independant mind is galling.  And how is one to remember what one has done with one’s Allowence, when it is mostly eaten up by Small Lones, Carfare, Stamps, Church Collection, Rose Water and Glicerine, and other Mild Cosmetics, and the aditional Food necesary when one is still growing?