hers, and she answered its squeeze with a desperate little clench of her own.

He left her wonderfully uplifted. Now she felt less an exile from marriage than a rebel. She almost convinced herself that she had kept out of matrimony because she was too good for it. The solitary cell of her bed was a queenly dais when she crept into it. She dreamed that General Kitchener asked for her hand and she refused it.

CHAPTER V

Meldrum's cynicisms had been strangely opportune to the strangely opportune to the despondent old maid. He unwittingly helped her over a deep ditch and got her past a bad night.

But when she woke, the next morning was but the same old resumption of the same old day. Poverty, loneliness, and the inanity of a manless household were again her portion. The face she washed explained to her why she was not sought after by the men. The hair she combed and wadded on her cranium clouded with no romance even in her own eyes. She realized that she was not loved for the simple reason that she was not lovely. She had never been a rose, and men did not pluck dog-fennel to wear. And the camomile could never become a marguerite by wishing to be one.

Debby haled her awkward self out of her humble cot, out of her coarse and frilless nightgown, into her matter-of-fact clothes, and slumped down to a chill, bare kitchen. There she made a fire in a cold stove, that she might warm up oatmeal and fry eggs and petrify a few slices of bread into a scratchy toast.

Not hearing her mother's slippers flap and shuffle on the stairs as usual, she climbed again to learn the cause. She found her mother filled with rheumatism and bad news. A letter had come the day before, and she had concealed it from Deborah so that the child might have a nice time at the party; and did she have a nice time, and who was there? But that could wait, for never was there such news as she had now, and there was never any let-up in bad luck, and them with no man to lean on or turn to.

When Deborah finally pried the letter from the poor old talons she found an announcement that the A.G.&St.P.Ry. would pass its dividend this year. To the Larrabees the A.G.&St.P. had always been the most substantial thing in the world next to the Presbyterian Church.

Deborah's father had said that his death-bed was cheered by the fact that he had left his widow and his child several shares of that soulful corporation's stock. He called 

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