her surroundings vanished. She was corresponding with Jennie
Atwater and Jennie began to write of Dumont--he had returned to
Saint X; Caroline Sylvester, of Cleveland, was visiting his
mother; it was all but certain that Jack and Caroline would
marry. "Her people want it," Jennie went on--she pretended to
believe that Jack and Pauline had given each the other up--"and
Jack's father is determined on it. They're together morning,
noon and evening. She's really very swell, though _I_ don't
think she's such a raving beauty." Following this came the
Saint X News-Bulletin with a broad hint that the engagement was
about to be announced.

"It's ridiculously false," said Pauline to herself; but she
tossed for hours each night, trying to soothe the sick pain in
her heart. And while she scouted the possibility of losing him,
she was for the first time entertaining it--a cloud in the great
horizon of her faith in the future; a small cloud, but black and
bold against the blue. And she had no suspicion that he had
returned from Chicago deliberately to raise that cloud.

A few days later another letter from Jennie, full of gossip about
Jack and Caroline, a News-Bulletin with a long article about
Caroline, ending with an even broader hint of her approaching
marriage--and Dumont sent Pauline a note from the hotel in
Villeneuve, five miles from Battle Field: "I must see you. Do
not deny me. It means everything to both of us--what I want to
say to you." And he asked her to meet him in the little park in
Battle Field on the bank of the river where no one but the
factory hands and their families ever went, and they only in the
evenings. The hour he fixed was ten the next morning, and she