She nodded, but otherwise did not respond. Her face, fixed absently on his, was intently thoughtful. Her silence, her control, her look of far-away thought, stirred both anger and consuming curiosity. “Well--what are you going to do? What’s the way out?” “It’s not the way out I’m thinking of--it’s the way in,” she returned slowly, quietly. “The Golden Doors are going to open.” “Open! How?” “I do not know.” “Through that Mr. Mor--” he was beginning, when he noticed that her fingers had mechanically torn the card across. “I do not know,” she repeated quietly. “But they are going to open. And now, please go--I want to think.” He gazed at her a moment, marveling that such unforeseen manipulations of Life, Life the great moulder and remoulder, had not seemed to change her ambition, her pride, her will, her girlish confidence: he understood her--yet she was the eternal mystery! Then he left her, standing in the middle of the hired drawing-room, mechanically tearing into tiny sifting flakes the invitation to a voyage among perfumed seas. CHAPTER XIV MARY FACES A CRISIS Clifford had just gone, and Mary now sat alone in the ornate drawing-room which for a brief week she had occupied as “Mrs. Grayson,” and considered rapidly the situation in which her own will and the unforeseen working-out of life and human nature had, within the last half-hour, suddenly placed her. Concrete questions, with their inseparable difficulties and dangers, rushed upon her: What was Clifford going to do? What was Jack going to do, whose mistress she had just declared herself to be before his father? And what would be the next move of Jack’s father, amiable forgiver of what he considered Jack’s discreet liaison, whose invitation to a yachting tour for two among West Indian seas lay in tiny fragments upon the floor?--which invitation, she knew, he would soon repeat and press for an answer. And most especially, just what was she going to do herself to make her way safely through all these dangers which beset her plans? Again she recalled Clifford’s grim words: he was through interfering with her, he was going to leave it to Life, to the shaping forces of Life’s experiences, to make her or ruin her. Well, she was going to show him! She was going to make Life her tool, her ally, her servant--she was going to bend all its currents to carry her in the direction of her desire!