habit of looking for the best in them she usually found it. Their spying, she realized, came from motives of interest. She had never known it to be put to malicious use. Hence, she never let it annoy her.

She loved her home; valued her kindly, if inquisitive, neighbors at their true worth; and met the world with a smile singularly free from hardness or cynicism.

Bitter though her experience had been, it had neither taken from, nor, miraculously, had it dimmed her faith in her particular star. On the contrary there still glowed in her grey eyes that sparkle of[20] anticipation one sees in the eyes of one who stands a-tiptoe on the threshold of adventure. Apparently she had in her nature an unquenchable spirit of hope that nothing could destroy. No doubt youth had aided her to retain this vision for she was still young and the highway of life, alluring in rosy mists, beckoned her along its mysterious path with persuasive hand. Who could tell what its hidden vistas might contain?

[20]

Her start, she confessed, had been an unpropitious one. But starts sometimes were like that; and did not the old adage affirm that a bad beginning made for a fair ending?

Furthermore, the error had been her own. She had been free to choose and she had chosen unwisely. Why whine about it? One must be a sport and play the game. She was older now and better fitted to look after herself than she had been at seventeen. Only a fool made the same blunder twice, and if experience had been a pitiless teacher, it had also been a helpful and convincing one.

Marcia did not begrudge her lesson. Unquestionably, it had taken from her its toll; but on the other hand it had left as compensation something she would not have exchanged for gold.

The past with its griefs, its humiliations, its heartbreak, its failure lay behind—the future all before her. It was hers—hers! She would be wary what[21] she did with it and never again would she squander it for dross.

[21]

Precisely what she wished or intended to make of that future she did not know. There were times when a wave of longing for something she could not put into words surged up within her with a force not to be denied. Was it loneliness? She was not so lonely that she did not find joy in her home and its daily routine of domestic duties.

On the contrary, she 

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