shivering in my long white nightgown. I just sat and sat; and gazed and gazed; and thought and thought; and dropped, I remember, little drops of melted wax along my bare arm, as I turned over my problem in my mind. "If only I didn't actually have to marry him!" I said out loud and turned and sank again into troubled silence. I got up once and carried the candle close to the cold, glass-covered picture of my mother that hung over my bed. Why did she have to die so long ago? What would she say—she who was to have been my best friend—what would she say if she could turn that clear-cut profile around and let me look into her eyes? I didn't know. I hadn't been old enough to remember even her smile. Shouldn't a girl be glad on the night of her betrothal? Shouldn't there be ardent looks, passionate words, tender caresses for her to live through again in thought? Shouldn't she long for the sight of the man whom she had promised to marry? "What shall I do, Father?" I said out loud. "What shall I do?" But only my clock answered me with its steady, unintelligible tick. No one could help me—no one in the wide world. I asked them, and they couldn't. Even Edith Campbell had said, "you'll know"; but oh, I didn't, I didn't.
So that is why, near morning, I got up again, went to my desk, opened a little secret drawer, and took out a picture. The picture was the one I had bought in New York after I had seen Robert Dwinnell at the theatre in the afternoon. Of course it is silly and very absurd for a girl of my years to treasure a picture of an actor in a secret drawer in her desk. I can't help it. That picture had been my ideal for almost
