She began to run, and not a girl in the school could run like her. Yard by yard she got over the hard road, till by daylight she found herself in the suburbs of the great city, though where she did not know. She walked on soberly till she came to a baker’s shop, and there bought a roll. There were early risers about, but no one looked at her, for her plain hat and coat were ordinary enough. Presently she grew bold enough to stop at a street coffee-stall. The hot, strong stuff did her good, and as she paid for it she began to think coherently for the first time since she had gone to bed. “I must have a place, and I haven’t one!” she pondered as she walked on refreshed. “If I could get to Andria I should be all right, but----” Her face grew too grim and bitter for her years. Andria had long ago forgotten her, and more pertinently still the child of five years ago had never known where the grown-up girl had gone. There was no hope in Andria. Without a friend in the world the girl walked quietly on her aimless way. Long before her absence was discovered--for her stout roommate merely thought stolidly that Beryl Corselas had got up early, and said nothing about her empty bed till breakfast-time--she was adrift like many another waif in the interminable streets of London. CHAPTER III. THE WHEELS OF FATE. Two days afterward a shabby little chemist in a shabby shop on the Euston road looked carelessly at a strange customer. A tall, big-boned girl in a frock too short for her had asked for laudanum for a toothache. She looked half-wild with pain--or despair; the chemist never thought of the latter, and he sold her some. Her face grew livid as he pushed a book toward her and requested her to sign her name. It was always done, he explained, when people bought poisons. With a frightened hand she scrawled something, but the name was so outlandish to the man as he stood peering at it that he never noticed with what haste his customer had left the shop. She had been a fool ever to have entered it, yet in the new and dreadful knowledge that two days of London streets had crowded on her she had felt there was nothing else to do. Perhaps her very innocence of the world had made her pass scatheless through perils she only half-realized, but that half was enough. Behind her lay the convent, and she could never go back to that; round her were the awful streets where policemen kept hurrying her on, where people passed her indifferent-eyed, or else--Beryl Corselas turned sick and faint at the thought of those other people who had not passed on. Her money had been stolen, all but the few shillings she had put in the bodice of her frock, and when that was done, what in all the world remained to her? No one had ever liked her. She had no belief in any one’s charity, and the girl’s heart swelled as she answered her own question.