Too late, she saw that mere gratitude does not kindle into love, and a sense of her own lack of frankness sealed her accusing lips. “I can not blame Hathorn!” she murmured. “It is my own fault. I told him the truth, but—not the whole truth!” Still, she suffered from the shattering of flattering hopes long secretly cherished, and saw now the marriage of her financial _éleve_ as a future bar to the confidential relations which had linked him to her fortunes with golden chains. “They will go on and play the game of life brilliantly without me—these two, whom I have unwittingly brought together. I will go on alone—now—to the end—unless I can find the lost thread. “Endicott must reopen the search! I will spend a half million—and—that other heart shall know mine!” She was lost in the memories of a buried past. As she entered the vestibule of the office building, a grave manly voice aroused her. “I thought that you should know this,” whispered Hugh Conyers, of the New York _Clarion_. “It has just come over the wires from Washington. “I was going up to tell the Judge, and have him send for you. You will have a busy day.” The startled woman read a slip which was the burden of the lightning Ariel which had set “Sugar soaring hellward” in the classic diction of James Potter, Esq. “Hugh!” gasped the Queen of the Street, as she drew him into a dark corner, “can I never reward you for your loyalty? Is there nothing I can do for you?” The Knight of the Pen laughed gaily, as he pocketed the yellow slip. “Not now! Lady Mine! You paid in advance when you saved Sara’s life by sending her away to Algiers! I’m off to the office. When you can give two respectably poor people an evening, send for us, that’s all—but, we want you all to ourselves! “If there is anything more, I will come around. Shall I tell this to Hathorn?” His eyes were fixed eagerly upon her. There was a slight ring of hardness in her voice, as she hastily said: “Not a word to him, in future. He is going to marry—and—go away for a time. I will handle this line alone—after this—only report to the Judge. He is my Rock of Gibraltar.” She disappeared in the elevator with a hard little laugh. For she was trying to make light of the blow which had told upon her lonely heart. The newspaper man edged his way up Nassau Street in a brown study. “Coming events cast their shadows before,” he muttered. “I wonder if she will ever know? Some day, perhaps.” Darting messenger boys and disgruntled pedestrians eyed wrathfully the high-browed man of forty, who strode along with his gray eyes fixed on vacancy. One or two “business women” noted the clean-cut, soldierly features, the well-shaped head, with all the intellectual stamp of old Amherst, brightened by the fierce intellectual rivalry of the nervous New York press.