It was Sunday night but though there was no dancing, people dropped in on motoring parties, ready to be warmed by hot suppers before they took the last stretch of the ride back to the city. And it was as Freda was going upstairs, still in that rapt absorption which had held her day that one of the incomers saw her and stopped still in amazement. She was in profile before him, her head held high and she was turning the curve of the stairs, walking slowly. The observer walked up to the desk and spoke to the manager who sat making out bills behind it. There was no visible register, though his eyes cast about for one. “Who was the lady who was going upstairs?” he asked unwisely. His manner did not recommend him. “A lady who is stopping here,” said the Swedish lady with some hostility, affronted by the casual question of this young gay fellow. She had observed Freda and was unlikely to give out information to young loafers. “I thought I knew her.” Ted Smillie tried to get on firmer ground. His interlocutor seemed to grunt in dubiousness. He gave it up and went into the dining-room, trying to find out more from the waiter. But the waiter was not too free. He had not been in a roadhouse inn three years without learning a kind of discretion. “Lady and her husbun’, suh. Several couples here. Couldn’t make sure, suh.” But Ted knew whom he had seen. He knew there had been no mistake. After all, except for a flare of jealousy, even that not too keen in his increasingly tasteless emotions, he would have felt that the man did not matter. But if she was that kind, why on earth had she turned him down? That would be his reasoning. And, flavoring the whole, that vitiated detective instinct which makes gossips of little minded men, was interested, and he was anxious to tell his story. He did not choose the two men with whom he was supping for confidants. He managed to get one of them to ask to see the register, just on the chance that it might throw light on Freda’s companion. But it did not help him. A party of young men and women had sprawled twenty or thirty names on the register last night. Ted did not know them and where that party began or ended he could not tell. There was not a recorded name familiar to him for the last three days. He went back to the city with his friends and the Roadside Inn grew quiet. Freda and Gregory could not sleep. There seemed a million new thoughts in the mind of each of them, contending with the few hours they were to be together. “I can’t bear to have morning come--and the end--” said Freda softly. She was more dependent now. “Say the word and I’ll cancel the contracts.” “You couldn’t. You know you said there’d be a forfeit. We’d be paying your bureau the rest of our lives. No--you must go. And I’ll be happy. But when you come back you’ll never go again. I’ll be no modern woman, I feel. I’ll be the sort of woman who cries when her husband goes to work.” It was delightful nonsense.