down. It was the last straw. Edith, on whom she had staked all her hopes of
physical comfort, was not there. Overstrained in body, nerves, and mind,
she sank helplessly in the chair which Septimus set out for her before the
fire, too exhausted to cry. She began to speak in a queer, toneless voice:

"I don't know what to do. Edith could have helped me. I want to get away
and hide. I can't stay here. It's the first place Zora will come to. She
mustn't find me. Edith has been through it herself. She would have taken me
somewhere abroad or in the country where I could have stayed in hiding till
it was over. It was all so sudden--the news of his marriage. I was half
crazy, I couldn't make plans. I thought Edith would help me. Now she has
gone, goodness knows where. My God, what shall I do?"

She went on, looking at him haggardly, a creature driven beyond the
reticence of sex, telling her inmost secret to a man as if it were a
commonplace of trouble. It did not occur to her distraught mind that he was
a man. She spoke to herself, without thought, uttering the cry for help
that had been pent within her all that awful night.

The puzzledom of Septimus grew unbearable in its intensity; then suddenly
it burst like a skyrocket and a blinding rain of fire enveloped him. He
stood paralyzed with pain and horror.

The sullen morning light diffused itself through the room, mingling
ironically with the pretty glow cast by the pink-shaded electric globes,
while the two forlorn grotesques regarded each other, unconscious of each
other's grotesqueness, the girl disheveled and haggard, the man with rough
gray coat unbuttoned, showing the rumpled evening dress; her toque
miserably awry, his black tie riding above his collar, the bow somewhere
behind his ear. And the tragedy of tragedies of a young girl's life was