symbolical purposes it might as well have been a dove) clasped to his
breast.

"Oh, I know," she responded presently in a voice which was full of
suppressed anger. "Everything is my fault--even the fact that I was
born!"

Shocked out of his conventional manner, he stared at her in silence, and
the pigeon, feeling the strain of his grasp, fluttered softly against
his overcoat. What was there indeed for him to do except stare at a lack
of reticence, of good-breeding, which he felt to be deplorable? His fine
young face, with its characteristic note of reserve, hardened into
sternness as he remembered having heard somewhere that the girl's mother
had been killed or injured when she was performing some dangerous act at
a country fair. Well, one might expect anything, he supposed, from such
an inheritance.

"May I help you?" he asked with distant and chilly politeness.

"Oh, can't you wait a minute?" She impatiently thrust aside his offer.
"I _must_ get my breath again."

It was plain that she was very angry, that she was in the clutch of a
smothered yet violent resentment, which, he inferred with reason, was
directed less against himself than against some abstract and impersonal
law of life. Her rage was not merely temper against a single human
being; it was, he realized, a passionate rebellion against Fate or
Nature, or whatever she personified as the instrument of the injustice
from which she suffered. Her eyes were gleaming through the web of light
and shadow; her mouth was trembling; and there was the moisture of