“Yes, I knew that,” she said, pleasantly, not meeting Barbara’s eye.

“Oh, well, then it’s all right,” Barbara said hastily, relieved.  “But he—­he has a teasing sort of way, you know.  His wife is in San Diego now, with her own people.”

“Yes, he told me that,” Julia said, only longing to escape before a maddening impulse to cry overpowered her.  Barbara saw the truth, and laid a friendly hand on Julia’s arm.

“I just wanted you to know,” she said in her kindliest tone.

Suddenly Julia burst out crying, childishly blubbering with her wrists in her eyes.  Barbara, very much distressed, shielded her as well as she could from the eyes of possible passers-by, and patted her shoulder with a gloved hand.

’I don’t know why—­perfectly crazy—­” gulped Julia, desperately fighting the sobs that shook her.  “And I’ve had a dreadful headache all day,” she broke out, pitifully, beginning to mop her eyes with a folded handkerchief, her face still turned away from Barbara.

“Oh, poor thing!” said Barbara.  “And the rehearsal must have made it worse!”

“It’s splitting,” Julia said sombrely.  She gave Barbara one grave, almost resentful, look, straightened her hat and fluffed up her hair, and went away.  Barbara looked after her, and thought that Carter was a beast, and that there was something very pitiful about common little ignorant Miss Page, and that she wouldn’t tell the girls about this, and give them one more cause to laugh at the little actress.  For Barbara Toland was a conscientious girl, and very seriously impressed with the gravity of her own responsibility toward other people.

Meanwhile Julia walked toward the Mechanics’ Library in a very fury of rage and resentment.  She hated the entire caste of “The Amazons,” and she hated Barbara Toland and Carter Hazzard more than the rest!  He could play with her and flirt with her and deceive her, and while she, Julia, fancied herself envied and admired of the other girls, this delicately perfumed and exquisitely superior Barbara could be deciding in all sisterly kindness that she must inform Miss Page of her admirer’s real position.  Angry tears came to Julia’s eyes, but she went into the Mechanics’ Library and washed the evidences of them away, and made herself nice to meet Mark.

But a subtle change in the girl dated from that day; casual and foolish as the affair with Carter had been, it left its scar.  Julia’s heart winced away from the thought of him as she herself might have shrunk from fire.  She never forgave him.

It was good to find Mark still enslaved, everything soothing and reassuring.  When Julia left him, at her own door at six o’clock, she was her radiant, confident self again, and they kissed each other at parting like true lovers.  To his eager demand for a promise Julia still returned a staid, “Mama’d be crazy, Mark.  I ain’t sixteen yet!” but on this enchanted afternoon she had consented to linger, on Kearney Street, before the trays of rings in jewellers’ windows, and it was in the wildest spirits that Mark bounded on upstairs to his own apartment.