And her own future? Five thousand dollars. What could she not do with that? First, clothes, of course. She would be the best dressed woman at Bradfield's. Jewels, too. And a little laid up for a rainy day, for Annie Holton was level-headed, and saw with grim philosophy the fate of the poor, tawdry, painted things of the street, who served to point the moral, when youth and good looks have fled. "I'm lucky," she cried aloud challengingly, "I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm--" She broke off sharply with a little cry of disgust. "You fool," she said, in a very different tone, a tone of the bitterest self-contempt, "you poor, weak fool! You know you're miserable. You know everything's a sham. You know your life isn't worth sixpence to you. And all because you're such a fool, with a dozen men crazy after you, you can't be satisfied because you can't have the one you want." The clock chimed the hour of ten. For a moment she sat silent, and then slowly nodded her head. "It oughtn't to be so," she said with conviction, "but it's the truth, just the same. A woman can get along if the man she's stuck on is stuck on her--and if he isn't, she's better dead." In the parlor of her pretty little home on Dalton Street Rose Ashton was pacing restlessly to and fro. Finally, with a sigh of weariness, she flung herself down on the sofa, and lay quiet, gazing into the dying embers with wide-open, unseeing eyes. Wave after wave, a flood of bitter, remorseful thoughts swept over her. What a weak thing, she mused, a woman is, after all. "To know the right and still the wrong pursue," she quoted to herself. "That's what I'm doing now, and that's what I've done for a year. Perhaps, before that, I wasn't to blame, but since I met Dick it's all been so different. Now I know, and yet three times in a year I've lowered myself to depths of which no decent woman would even dream. And perhaps I've got more shame before me still. And yet I do it--hating it, protesting, drawing back, almost refusing,--and then doing it, because he tells me to. I might as well be honest. I've damned myself for a man who's using me to help himself, and I've done it just on the hope that he's going to be honest with me and do what he's promised. I've done it because I'm weak, I've done it because I couldn't help myself, I've done it--because I'm a woman." She sat silently watching the last embers die. The clock in the square boomed the hour of ten. With a sigh of utter weariness she rose. "Life for a woman," she murmured, "is safe--monotonous, perhaps, but safe--until the man comes along. And then, the old life and all its memories are gone for ever in the twinkling of an eye, and the woman's true life begins. And perhaps, after all, the old life was the better, for the new may be Heaven--and it may be hell." CHAPTER XII THE FINAL OBSTACLE