He saw her press her lips together, her eyes fixed on the road ahead, and he saw the beautiful brows contract, as if the memory still were too keen for her to bear calmly. "You have certainly atoned a hundred times over," he said gently, "for any carelessness in the past. How could you know how she was feeling? And she was insane, Miss Stockton said." "No more insane than I am now--simply desperate with weariness and failure. And I should have seen; I did see. I just--didn't care. I was busy trying on a box of new frocks from a French dressmaker, frocks of silk and lace--of silk and lace, Jordan King, while she hadn't clothes enough to keep her warm! And I couldn't spare the time to look at the girl's book! Well, I learned what it was to have people turn me from their doors--I, with plenty of money at my command, no matter how I elected to dress cheaply and go to cheap boarding places, and--insist on cheap beds at hospitals." Her tone was full of scorn. "After all, did I ever really suffer anything of what she suffered? Never, for always I knew that at any minute I could turn from a poor girl into a rich one, throw my book in the faces of those who refused to buy it, and telephone my anxious family. They did come on and try to get me away--once. I went with them--for the day. It was the day you met me. And always there was the interest of the adventure. It was an adventure, you know, a big one." "I should say it was. And when you were at the hospital--" "Accepting expensive rooms and free medical attendance--oh, wasn't I a fraud? How I felt it I can never tell you. But I could--and did--send back Doctor Burns a draft in part payment, though I thought he would never imagine where it came from. He did, though. What do you suppose he told me last night when we were driving home?--this morning it was, of course." "I can't guess," King admitted, suffering a distinct and poignant pang of jealousy at thought of Red Pepper Burns driving through the night with this girl, on an errand of mercy though it had been. "He told me," she said slowly, "that he learned all about me while I was in the hospital. One night, when I was at the worst, he sent Miss Arden out for a rest and sat beside me himself. And in my foolish, delirious wanderings I gave him the whole story, or enough of it so that he pieced out the rest. And he never told a soul, not even his wife; wasn't that wonderful of him? And treated me exactly the same as if he didn't practically know I wasn't what I seemed. You see, I wasn't far enough away from that poor girl's suicide, when I was so ill last year, but that it was always in my mind. Even yet I dream of it at times."