did nothing to dispel the depression. The six full-length portraits
in oils that hung on the walls represented men and women whose
years, if added together, would have made a staggering grand total.
Even the furniture was Colonial.

But when Joan had put on her hat, sweater and a pair of thick-soled
country boots, and having taken care to see that no one was about,
slid down the banisters into the hall on her way out for her usual
lonely walk, she slipped into the garden with a queer sense of
excitement, an odd and unaccountable premonition that something was
going to happen. This queer thing had come to her in the middle of
lunch and had made her heart suddenly begin to race. If she had been
given to self analysis, which she was not, she might have told
herself that she had received a wireless message from some one as
lonely as herself, who had sent out the S.O.S. call in the hope of
its being picked up and answered. As it was, it stirred her blood
and made her restless and intensely eager to get into the open, to
feel the sun and smell the sweetness in the air and listen to the
cheery note of the birds.

It was with something of the excited interest which must have
stirred Robinson Crusoe on seeing the foot-prints on the sand of
what he had conceived to be a desert island that she ran up the
hill, through the awakened woods whose thick carpet of brown leaves
was alight with the green heads of young ferns, and out to the
clearing from which she had so often gazed wist fully in the
direction of the great city away in the distance.

She was surprised to find that she was alone as usual, bitterly
disappointed to see no other sign of life than her friends the