She watched his broad, stolid back move slowly across the room, saw him pause for a moment at the door and then plunge resolutely through it, and then she was alone. Not a sound came to her ears. The desk by the switchboard was deserted. A bracket lamp on the wall opposite was crooked; one of the crystal pendants beneath it was broken short off. Someone had dropped a burnt match on the floor in front of the desk and it lay there in mute sacrilege. All at once the silence seemed fraught with a tumult of hateful suggestions, and, without ringing for the elevator, she sprang to her feet, rushed for the steps, and fled up to her room. She switched on the light and stood for a moment by the table fingering an ivory paper cutter. Then she went to the window and peered out. Not a sound came to her, not a single, friendly sound. Below her the leafy branches stretched out, inert, indifferent; and below them, darkness. "And this is the man," she thought, "from whom I have borrowed all that money." PART III BLOOMFIELD CHAPTER XVII Fate smiled. An itinerant Swiss became interested in the tea room. There were a few days of sharp bargaining and on October the fourteenth it was sold to him. The price just barely covered the indebtedness. Mary Louise made haste to send Claybrook a check for the fifteen hundred dollars plus the interest. Two days later she got the notes through the mail with no comment and she tremblingly tore them into bits and scattered the bits from her window. Then she went to the bank and took up the note for the six hundred dollars she had originally borrowed. It left her nothing, but she was free. She had lived the summer and was where she had started. A little wan, feeling a little empty, she caught the train for Bloomfield. All during the trip she gazed from the window, dizzily conscious of the shifting landscape, dimly aware of her retreat.... Miss Susan McCallum looked up from her rocking chair as Mary Louise entered the sitting room. There was no surprise in her greeting, and she suffered her cheek to be kissed in silence. Old Landy stuck his grizzled head in at the door at the unusual commotion and Mary Louise, unaccountably and suddenly touched by something subtly familiar and friendly, trilled: "I've come to look after you, Aunt Susie. Just couldn't stay away any longer. The countryside was perfectly beautiful as I came up this morning in the train. It's the loveliest October I've ever seen. Think of being cooped up in the city this time of year." Landy grinned and came shambling in with a greeting. Miss Susie's eyebrows went up and there was a suspicion of moisture on the lashes. "Well, you needn't have done it. Landy and I have been managing very well. But _you_ look a little peaked." She turned and laid her knitting on the table by her side. "Little Missy's a sight fo' so' eyes," interjected Landy and then withdrew. Directly they could hear him authoritatively ordering someone about.