an innocent bystander! Things must happen to me; they must. All kinds of things!"

It was the sort of challenge to which Fate is apt to give attentive ear.

Presently, out of facts and recollections she slipped, as was her wont, into a game of Pretend, which had been a sort of accompaniment to Joan from her cradle; growing as she grew, changing as life changed its aspect to her eyes. She was no longer plain little Joan Darcy, returning from school in a shabby suit which she had outgrown, to a shabby home which she had also somewhat outgrown. She was a glorified young person of the singer or actress variety, returning from a career of conquest in foreign parts, with her maid Fifine traveling second class in the coach behind, as they do in all the better novels. Her father, not much altered from real life except that there were no spots on his clothes (the Major's manner being grand enough for any circumstances), would be at the station with the victoria and pair—or perhaps the limousine—and would murmur to the second footman, "Home, James"; and at the door of the family mansion, a pillared, fan-lighted door (Joan's mind lingered lovingly over architectural details even in her haste to reach the people in the doorway) would be Ellen Neal first, dropping respectful curtsies—quite a stretch, this, even for Joan's imagination!—and beyond her, in a lovely tea-gown, all silk and lace and newness, would stand her mother with outstretched arms, waiting....

Here Joan became suddenly aware that she was dropping large, hot tears upon her precious chocolates—she who had sworn never, never to cry any more in all her life, because tears are only useless things that make the nose red!

"But why am I crying?" she demanded of herself, puzzled, still mazed with her game of Pretend.

It was because her mother would not be in that doorway, waiting; nor anywhere ever again—unless there really is a Heaven.

Joan sat there, too proud to bury her face in her hands or to search for a handkerchief, intensely conscious that people were glancing her way, praying wildly to all her gods to keep her from blubbering aloud; and she looked so like a haughty infant in distress that the young man opposite, he whom she had characterized as a necktie drummer, could not long restrain active sympathy.

"Pardon me," he said awkwardly, leaning toward her. "Are you in some sort of trouble? Anything I can do?"

Joan summoned all her scattered forces to meet this emergency in a manner that would do credit to the precepts of Sister Mary Joseph. She elevated her small red nose, and lifting her eyes to about the level of his scarf-pin (a rather cheap scarf-pin) remarked: "You can go away. I am telling myself sad stories of the death of kings."

The necktie drummer retired, permanently, to the smoking-car.

This victory cheered Joan into momentarily forgetting her mother. Already an adventure to write to the girls! She wished that she had looked a little farther up than the scarf-pin.

Shortly the old lady whose daughter might have been Joan's age if she had lived, invited Joan to be her guest in the dining-car, and was repulsed, coldly and firmly. One hears such tales of wicked old harpies on trains leading trustful girls into the most frightful predicaments!

"No, thank you," said our heroine. "I never have much appetite on trains."

Soon the car was quite empty, and Joan, mopping the last of the tears from her eyes, selected the largest of the chocolates and drew from some recess of her person a white-headed pin. There was also, to be discussed later, a packet of sandwiches, typical Convent affairs—large slabs of bread embracing pale and clammy ham. Joan thought of these with resignation. The odor of broiling beefsteak came back from the car ahead rather poignantly. Joan had lied to the old lady. At eighteen, with every nerve and organ in healthy coöperation, appetite is not likely to fail, on trains or elsewhere. Nor was it as if she did not have the necessary dollar in her pocket. Major Darcy always managed to rise to the occasion somehow when the ladies of his family went traveling. He had a horror of gentlewomen finding themselves among strangers temporarily embarrassed for funds—quite a different affair from a permanent condition of the sort when in the home circle.

She knew that it was expected of her to spend her dollar in riotous living; but she could not forget (the Joans of the world never can forget) that a dollar is the price of a pair of white gloves or a pair of silk stockings. And so she munched her sacrificial sandwiches with a considering eye on the future.

CHAPTER II

Later, as she lay propped up in her snug little berth (far the pleasantest part of the journey to Joan), with her shade up for fear of missing anything of the mysterious night that passed outside—strange, silent cities, isolated farms asleep in the starlight, the glow of smelting fires as they flashed by, like a startling glimpse into the infernal regions—it suddenly occurred to Joan that her father had been unprecedentedly lavish in his provision for her journey home.

"Money for good-by presents to all the girls; money for ticket, and sleeper, and tips, and ten dollars besides—goodness! Dad must have struck something!" she mused, deciding that it was really business that kept him from coming to see her graduate, and not, to put it delicately, the lack of business.

In the Darcy family things were always put delicately. The mention of cost was deprecated. One never said crudely that a thing could not be afforded. One "preferred not to bother about it just then," or one "liked last year's hat so much better than any in the shops," or one "enjoyed the freedom of being without servants for a while—it was a relief."

Occasionally Joan's mother, before she overcame the blunter speech of the North, had offended the family taste with plain statements about prices and possibilities. Joan, observant from her cradle, drew her own conclusions from the expression of wincing deprecation these faux pas produced upon her father's face, or upon that of the cousin or aunt or what-not in the way of Darcy relation that was usually visiting them.

"Mamma," she had asked once in the murmured intimacy that preceded sleepy time, "isn't money a very nice fing?"

"A very nice thing indeed, babykins," answered the lady with a faint sigh.

"Then why mustn't us never speak about it?"

It was not the only one of her daughter's questions that the harassed woman had been obliged to parry with what skill lay at her command. Honesty always came more easily to Mary Darcy than subterfuge.

Joan grew up into the family habit of euphonious speech; but, thanks to a certain inheritance from her mother, facts had a way of presenting themselves to her inner vision with a clarity, a brutal frankness of outline, quite unprecedented in the mind of a Darcy.

Her facility in the valuable game of Pretend came from the paternal strain. Richard Darcy was one of those fortunate spirits who move through life to the sound of an invisible drum corps—a procession of one, affably ready for whatever honors Fate chose to thrust upon him. Joan, too, was quite prepared for the best the world had to offer. Nevertheless, unlike her father, she was never unaware of the difference between pretense and reality, nor of the fixed line dividing them. When she lied, it was deliberately, with her eyes wide open.

Just now she chose to step over the dividing line firmly into reality. Perhaps her dinner may have had something to do with it; a diet of chocolates and ham sandwiches not being conducive to glamour of thought, even at eighteen.

Joan wished, soberly, that she were happier at the idea of going home. She wished that she were not haunted by a vague dread of it....

The Convent—with its daily round of prescribed duties and pleasures, its fixed intimates and enemies, its atmosphere of simple