Three months before, the Avenue would have meant nothing to Sidney. Now she knew. Christine, more sophisticated, had always known. “You see,” she said. “That's what I'm up against.” Quite suddenly Sidney knew who the girl at 213 ---- Avenue was. The paper she held in her hand was hospital paper with the heading torn off. The whole sordid story lay before her: Grace Irving, with her thin face and cropped hair, and the newspaper on the floor of the ward beside her! One of the bridesmaids thumped violently on the door outside. “Another electric lamp,” she called excitedly through the door. “And Palmer is downstairs.” “You see,” Christine said drearily. “I have received another electric lamp, and Palmer is downstairs! I've got to go through with it, I suppose. The only difference between me and other brides is that I know what I'm getting. Most of them do not.” “You're going on with it?” “It's too late to do anything else. I am not going to give this neighborhood anything to talk about.” She picked up her veil and set the coronet on her head. Sidney stood with the letter in her hands. One of K.'s answers to her hot question had been this:-- “There is no sense in looking back unless it helps us to look ahead. What your little girl of the ward has been is not so important as what she is going to be.” “Even granting this to be true,” she said to Christine slowly,--“and it may only be malicious after all, Christine,--it's surely over and done with. It's not Palmer's past that concerns you now; it's his future with you, isn't it?” Christine had finally adjusted her veil. A band of duchesse lace rose like a coronet from her soft hair, and from it, sweeping to the end of her train, fell fold after fold of soft tulle. She arranged the coronet carefully with small pearl-topped pins. Then she rose and put her hands on Sidney's shoulders. “The simple truth is,” she said quietly, “that I might hold Palmer if I cared--terribly. I don't. And I'm afraid he knows it. It's my pride that's hurt, nothing else.” And thus did Christine Lorenz go down to her wedding. Sidney stood for a moment, her eyes on the letter she held. Already, in her new philosophy, she had learned many strange things. One of them was this: that women like Grace Irving did not betray their lovers; that the code of the underworld was “death to the squealer”; that one played the game, and won or lost, and if he lost, took his medicine. If not Grace, then who? Somebody else in the hospital who knew her story, of course. But who? And again--why? Before going downstairs, Sidney placed the letter in a saucer and set fire to it with a match. Some of the radiance had died out of her eyes.