"I wonder if I've done right," she queried. "He will succeed me and do great things for Roma, but O, I wish I could help him. I wish I dared let myself love him as he deserves. I wish I were one of the softer, clinging women, made to love a man and to depend on him for happiness. After all, they are the fortunate ones. But,--what am I saying? Brace up, Gertrude Van Deusen; don't be a sentimental girl! You've prided yourself on your independence of mind and heart. At your age, to be thinking of a man,--and one whose ideal is so far from what you know yourself to be! I'll go to Europe this winter and stay a year. I'll soon get back to my old spirit, and cease to think--" The telephone rang. "Well?" she asked. "There's been an explosion down back of your house among the street-department's tools," some one was saying. "Two men were hit by flying rocks and hurt, we fear badly. One of them was a laborer,--" "And the other?" asked Gertrude quickly, her heart divining the truth. "Was Commissioner Allingham. He had just come to inspect the work. May we take them to your house until we can get the ambulance and the doctors?" "Take them there at once," she responded. "Get the doctors, but don't call the ambulances yet--until we know what to do with the men. I'll be right down." She flew to her closet and hurried into her coat. At the door, her carriage waited and she gave orders to drive as fast as possible. Then she sat back against the luxurious cushions, trying to control the terror that had come suddenly upon her spirit. She no longer doubted and hesitated. The shock had revealed the depths of her own heart which she had not sounded. She came in a moment to know that love is not a feeling to be analyzed or nurtured or trained into growth; the thing she had been repressing and torturing into subjection suddenly became a divine, reverential passion. As they drove through the tree-shaded streets she trembled lest John Allingham might already have crossed the mysterious boundary which separates the living from the dead, and she would meet only a life-long sorrow at her door,--a sorrow which would crown her life with sanctifying, uplifting influences, even though it crushed her heart and benumbed her soul. But even that, she realized, was infinitely better than the starving of love with which she had been cheating herself. She bent her head and prayed while the carriage rolled rapidly on under the overarching elms and up the graveled driveway to her house. Once within she passed rapidly upstairs, unfastening her wraps as she did so, and going towards the rooms where she knew the injured men would be carried. They had been taken, she was told, to her father's old room, where the doctor was already with them. Dared she go in? Throwing her wraps in at the door to her own apartment, she turned again towards the sick-chamber. And then she stood face to face with John Allingham. "John," she sobbed. "O, John."