"I wish I'd been there," she said regretfully. "He'd only have got in that motor over my dead body; but, Wallace, when did you hear all this?" "I met Alice Wilstead limping up the avenue, on her way home, and she told me about it." "I wish--" began Maud, but she was interrupted by a summons to the telephone. When she returned to the room a few moments later, her face was graver than ever. "I'll have to leave you, Wallace," she said. "You can stay here with the cat and the fire and the tea-kettle if you want to. Perhaps mother will come in, but Dita wishes me to come to her at once." CHAPTER X OUT OF THE GILDED CAGE Prompt as Maud was in responding to Dita's plea for her immediate presence, Dita was equally prompt in hurling herself upon her friend's sympathetic bosom. Maud had been shown at once to the sitting-room of Mrs. Hepworth's personal suite of apartments, and there Dita sat in the dim and depressing gloaming of the unlighted chamber, a figure of dejection. She had not even removed her hat, but sat brooding in the twilight until Maud's entrance roused her and she flung herself across the room and into the latter's arms with the impetuous rush of a cyclone. Dita was temperamentally far more given to anger than to tears, but the strain of the last two days had culminated now in a burst of wild weeping, and Maud found it necessary to soothe and calm her before she could venture to inquire into the immediate cause of her friend's very poignant and unfeigned distress; so she applied herself to the task of consolation with only vague conjectures as to the cause for grief. She was able, however, from Dita's almost incoherent statements, to patch together a fairly accurate idea of what had occurred. "Just read this letter," Dita thrust the sheets into Maud's hand. "Oh, you can not, not in this light. Wait a moment," she touched a button and the room was flooded with a rose-colored radiance. Maud stepped nearer one of the lamps and gave her most earnest attention to the words Cresswell Hepworth had written. His utterance through the medium of the pen, was brief, self-controlled, restrained and to the point. And as Maud read his well-considered words, something like a feeling of despair swept over her.