"I'm glad!" Pat told herself. "I'm glad it's over, and I'm glad I promised Dr. Carl--I guess I was mighty close to the brink of disaster that time."

She examined the injuries on her face, carefully powdered to conceal the worst effects from her mother. The trick had worked, too; Mrs. Lane had delivered herself of an excited lecture on the dangers of the gasoline age, and then thanked Heaven it was no worse. Well, Pat reflected, she had good old Dr. Carl to thank for the success of the subterfuge; he had broken the news very skillfully, set the stage for her appearance, and calmed her mother's apprehensions of scars. And Pat, surveying her image in the glass above her dressing-table, could see for herself the minor nature of the hurts.

"Scars--pooh!" she observed. "A bruised cheek, a split lip, a skinned chin. All I need is a black eye, and I guess I'd have had that in five minutes more, and perhaps a cauliflower ear into the bargain."

But her mood was anything but flippant; she was fighting off the time when her thoughts had of necessity to face the unpleasant, disturbing facts of the affair. She didn't want to think of the thing at all; she wanted to laugh it off and forget it, yet she knew that for an impossibility. The very desire to forget she recognized as a coward's wish, and she resented the idea that she was cowardly.

"Forget the wise-cracks," she advised her image. "Face the thing and argue it out; that's the only way to be satisfied."

She rose with a little grimace of pain at the twinge from her bruised knees, and crossed to the chaise lounge beside the far window. She settled herself in it and resumed her cogitations. She was feeling more or less herself again; the headache of the morning had nearly vanished, and aside from the various aches and a listless fagged-out sensation, she approximated her normal self. Physically, that is; the shadow of that other catastrophe, the one she hesitated to face, was another matter.

"I'm lucky to get off this easily," she assured herself, "after going on a bust like that one, like a lumberjack with his pay in his pocket."

She shook her head in mournful amazement. "And I'm Patricia Lane, the girl whom Billy dubbed 'Pat the Impeccable'! Impeccable! Wandering through alleys in step-ins and a table cloth--getting beaten up in a drunken brawl--passing out on rot-gut liquor--being carried home and put to bed! Not impeccable; incapable's the word! I belong to Dr. Carl's 

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