“I know about it and I’ve told Maud,” the railroad man’s sister said sharply. “We don’t need to talk about it no more.” * * * * * Maud Welliver had listened with flushed cheeks to her father’s words, and even as he talked had made up her mind she would see May again and soon. Since coming to Bidwell she had not left the house at night, but now she felt suddenly quite strong and well. When the supper was finished and darkness came on she got up from her chair on the porch and spoke to her aunt, at work inside the house. “I feel better than I have for months, aunty,” she said, “and I’m going for a little walk. You know the doctor said I was to walk all I could and I can’t walk during the day on account of the heat. I’ll just go uptown a little while.” Maud went cautiously along the sidewalk toward the business section of town and then crossed over and returning on the opposite side, stole along, walking on the grass at the edge of lawns. What an adventure! She felt like one being admitted into some strange world filled with romance. For her May Edgley’s tales had become golden apples of existence, to taste which she would risk anything. “What a person!” she thought as she crept forward in the darkness, lifting and putting down her feet on the grass like a kitten compelled to walk in water. She thought of May Edgley’s adventure in the wood with Jerome Hadley. How stupid her father had been, how stupid everyone in the town of Bidwell! “It must be so with men and women everywhere,” she thought vaguely. “They go on thinking they know what’s happening, and they know nothing.” She thought of May Edgley, small and a woman, alone in the forest with a man—a dark determined man, intent upon murder. The man held in his hand a little package containing a white powder. A few grains of it in a cup of coffee and a human life would go out. A man who walked and talked and went about the streets of Bidwell with other men would become a white lifeless bit of clay. Maud had been at several times in her life close to the door of death. She imagined a scene. There was a rich man’s home with soft carpets, woven of priceless stuffs, brought from the Orient. One walking on the carpets made no sound. The feet sank softly into the velvety stuff and soft-voiced servants moved about. A man entered and sat at breakfast. The movies had not at that time come to Bidwell but Maud had read many popular novels and several times, at Fort Wayne, had been to the theatre.