A glint of white on the grass caught her eye; she stooped and found it to be a diminutive quill feather dropped by some passing pigeon. It lay across her palm for a second, and then--the whim taking her--she shot it exultantly into the air. Where it fell she marked the way it pointed, and that was the road she took. It was beginning to seem years ago since she had sat in Marjorie Schuyler's den listening to Billy Burgeman's confession of a crime for which he had not sounded in the least responsible. That was on Tuesday. It was now Friday--three days--seventy-two hours later. She preferred to think of it in terms of hours--it measured the time proportionally nearer to the actual feeling of it. Strangely enough, it seemed half a lifetime instead of half a week, and Patsy could not fathom the why of it. But what puzzled her more was the present condition of Billy Burgeman, himself. As far as she was concerned he had suddenly ceased to exist, and she was pursuing a Balmacaan coat and plush hat that were quite tenantless; or--at most--they were supported by the very haziest suggestion of a personality. The harder she struggled to make a flesh-and-blood man therefrom the more persistently did it elude her--slipping through her mental grasp like so much quicksilver. She tried her best to picture him doing something, feeling something--the simplest human emotion--and the result was an absolute blank. And all the while the shadow of a very real man followed her down the road--a shadow in grotesquely flapping rags, with head flung back. A dozen times she caught herself listening for the tramp of his feet beside hers, and flushed hotly at the nagging consciousness that pointed out each time only the mocking echo of her own tread. Like the left-behind cottage, the road became unexpectedly lonely and discouraging. "The devil take them both!" she sputtered at last. "When one man refuses to be real at all, and the other pesters ye with being too real--'tis time to quit their company and let them fetch up where and how they like." But an O'Connell is never a quitter; and deep down in Patsy's heart was the determination to see the end of the road for all three of them--if fate only granted the chance. She came to a cross-roads at length. She had spied it from afar and hailed it as the end of her troubles; now she would learn the right way to Arden. But Patsy reckoned without chance--or some one else. The sign-boards had all been ripped from their respective places on a central post and lay propped up against its base. There was little information in them for Patsy as she read: "Petersham, five miles; Lebanon, twelve miles; Arden, seven miles--" The last sign went spinning across the road, and Patsy dropped on a near-by stone with the anguish of a great tragedian. "Seven miles--seven miles! I'm as near to it and I know as much about it as when I started three days ago. Sure, I feel like a mule, just, on a treadmill, with Billy Burgeman in the hopper."