“Let me go, please,” she repeated, and this time, despairingly, he obeyed her, a conviction of her incommunicability overwhelming him.  He turned and, fumbling with the key, unlocked the door and opened it.  “I’ll see you to-morrow,” he faltered once more, and watched her as she went through the darkened outer room until she gained the lighted hallway beyond and disappeared.  Her footsteps died away into silence.  He was trembling.  For several minutes he stood where she had left him, tortured by a sense of his inability to act, to cope with this, the great crisis of his life, when suddenly the real significance of that strange last look in her eyes was borne home to him.  And he had allowed her to go out into the streets alone!  Seizing his hat and coat, he fairly ran out of the office and down the stairs and across the bridge.

“Which way did that young lady go?” he demanders of the sergeant.

“Why—­uh, West Street, Mr. Ditmar.”

He remembered where Fillmore Street was; he had, indeed, sought it out one evening in the hope of meeting her.  He hurried toward it now, his glance strained ahead to catch sight of her figure under a lamp.  But he reached Fillmore Street without overtaking her, and in the rain he stood gazing at the mean houses there, wondering in which of them she lived, and whether she had as yet come home....

After leaving Ditmar Janet, probably from force of habit, had indeed gone through West Street, and after that she walked on aimlessly.  It was better to walk than to sit alone in torment, to be gnawed by that Thing from which she had so desperately attempted to escape, and failed.  She tried to think why she had failed....  Though the rain fell on her cheeks, her mouth was parched; and this dryness of her palate, this physical sense of lightness, almost of dizziness, were intimately yet incomprehensibly part and parcel of the fantastic moods into which she floated.  It was as though, in trying to solve a problem, she caught herself from time to time falling off to sleep.  In her waking moments she was terror-stricken.  Scarce an hour had passed since, in a terrible exaltation at having found a solution, she had gone to Ditmar’s office in the mill.  What had happened to stay her?  It was when she tried to find the cause of the weakness that so abruptly had overtaken her, or to cast about for a plan to fit the new predicament to which her failure had sentenced her, that the fantasies intruded.  She heard Ditmar speaking, the arguments were curiously familiar—­but they were not Ditmar’s!  They were her father’s, and now it was Edward’s voice to which she listened, he was telling her how eminently proper it was that she should marry Ditmar, because of her Bumpus blood.  And this made her laugh....  Again, Ditmar was kissing her hair.  He had often praised it.  She had taken it down and combed it out for him; it was like a cloud, he said—­so fine; its odour made him faint—­and then the odour changed, became that of the detested perfume of Miss Lottie Myers!  Even that made Janet smile!  But Ditmar was strong, he was powerful, he was a Fact, why not go back to him and let him absorb and destroy her?  That annihilation would be joy....