“No, walk, not run, to the nearest exit.” He barked his new, ugly laugh at her as Sally was backing hurriedly toward the door, her body hunched as if his words had been actual blows, her face ghastly white. “You are entirely free to go, with my blessing! I am rather a connoisseur at kissing and I have just suffered a grievous disappointment. At the risk of appearing ungallant, I am forced to admit that you would have bored me intolerably if you had consented to ‘trust me and give me all’ in exchange for my silence in regard to your birth. Goodby, Sally—and good luck.” CHAPTER XIX Somehow she made her way home, crept painfully, like a mortally wounded animal, up the circular staircase to her room. Bracing her shaking hands on her dressing table, she stared at her reflection in the mirror as if she had never seen that white-faced, enormous-eyed, stricken girl before. Then horror and loathing of herself swept over her with such force that her knees buckled, and she sank to the floor. As she fell her hand knocked from the dressing table a copy of The Capital City Press, for which she was still subscribing, over her mother’s protest, to glean sparse news of David. She shuddered as the roll bounced from her knees but in another moment her sick eyes flamed with new life, for half-revealed by the folding of the sheets was an unmistakable picture of the boy she still loved. Her trembling fingers gouged at the wrapper. Why was _his_ picture on the front page? Was he in trouble? Hurt? Or—married? Sally, crouching on the floor of her room, spread the crackling sheets of The Capital City Press, her eyes devouring the two-column picture of David Nash. Two lines of type above the photograph leaped out at her: “Honor graduate of A. & M. inherits grandfather’s farm.” He hadn’t been injured or killed in an accident, he wasn’t married! In a frenzy of relief and gratitude to the God she had just been accusing of deserting her, Sally Barr, who had been Sally Ford, bent her head until her lips rested on the lips of the photograph. And it was rather a pity that Arthur Van Horne, “connoisseur of kissing,” was not there to see the passionate fervor of the kisses which the girl whom he had dismissed contemptuously was raining upon an unresponsive newspaper picture. When at last she was calmer she read the short item through. It was the last paragraph that brought her to her feet, her slight body electric with sudden determination: “Young Nash is living alone in the fine old farmhouse, and apparently is as capable in the kitchen as on the seat of a cultivator. He says his whole heart is in scientific farming, and that his only sweetheart is ‘Sally,’ a blue-ribbon heifer which he is grooming to break the world’s butter-fat production record.” “David! Darling David!” she was laughing and crying at the same time. “He hasn’t changed! He hasn’t forgotten that we’re half-married!”