quickly toward the point where she planned to scale the high fence which still shut her from freedom. There was no moon, but the night was luminous with starshine, and she hugged the shadows of the cottages. These buildings shouldered one another closely in most part, but she came presently to a gap in the friendly obscurity where a site awaited a structure for which the state had vouchsafed no funds. It was bare of any sort of screen whatever, and lay in full range not only of the quadrangle, which it broke, but of the gatehouse beyond.

Nor was this all. Drifting round the last sheltering corner came the reek of a pipe. Jean's heart sank. After all, the trap! Then second thought told her that a foe in ambush would not smoke, and she gathered courage to reconnoiter. Across the quadrangle she made out the motionless figure of the watch. He was plainly without suspicion. He had completed his circuit and was lounging against a hydrant, his idle gaze upon the stars.

So for cycling ages he sat. Yet but a quarter of an hour had lapsed when the man knocked the ashes from his pipe, yawned audibly, and turned upon his heel. The instant the door of the gatehouse swallowed him, Jean sped like a phantom across the open ground, skirted the hospital, the tool-sheds, and the hotbeds, and plunged into the recesses of the garden. All else was simple. The high fence had no terrors; her scaling-ladder was a piece of board. The asperities of the barbed wire she softened with her shawl. When the town clock brought forth its next languid announcement she heard it without a tremor. She was resting on a mossy slope a mile or more away.

She made but a brief halt, for the East, toward which she set her face, was already paling. It was no blind flight. She struck for the hills deliberately, since behind the hills ran the boundary of another commonwealth. All fellow-runaways, whose stories she knew, had foolishly held to the railroad or other main-traveled ways, and, barring the brilliant Sophie, had for that very reason come early to disaster. Jean reasoned that they were in all likelihood city girls whom the woods terrified. Their stupidity was incredible. To fear what they should love! She took great breaths of the cool fragrance. She could not get her fill of it.

Nevertheless, it was not yet her purpose to quit the tilled countryside utterly. She hoped first to compel clothing from it somehow—clothing, and then food, of which she began to feel the need. The fact that she must probably come unlawfully by these necessaries gave her slight compunction. In some rose-colored, 

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