"He has gone, actually gone," cried Dita, as Maud handed the letter back to her without comment. "Gone," she repeated the words as if the fact in itself were quite unbelievable. She crushed the letter in her hand and threw it on the floor. "He will be gone months, looking after his mines and railroads and I'm to stay here. He never even said good-by to me, and this," she touched the crumpled ball of paper contemptuously with her foot, "gives me very plainly to understand that it is a virtual separation. Oh," she jerked the pins out of her hat and sent that plumey velvet head-covering spinning across the room, then turned to her calm and sympathetic friend with a real fear and a real appeal in her eyes. "What am I going to do? For a few months it will be all right, and then people will begin to talk like everything. And you know how it will appear. Every one will say that Cresswell discovered that I was having an affair with some one, Eugene, of course, and that he, Cresswell, and I had a row and that he refused to live with me longer, but that he nevertheless was so chivalrous that he turned over this house and the country places to me. Oh, dear, why did I have to have a sirocco?" "Heaven knows," said Maud. "Let it be a lesson to you. Never have another one. There, there, dear, I didn't mean any reproaches or I told-you-sos. So stop howling or you'll mar your beauty permanently. Oh, now, don't lift your head and glare at me indignantly and say you hope you will, that it's never been anything but a curse to you. I've been too plain all my life to listen with patience to anything of the kind. Now, let me think." She sat with finger on lip deeply considering, while Dita still punctured the silence with loud occasional sobs. "You will have to travel," she said decisively. "Yup will have to travel until people begin to talk and then you will have to keep on traveling until they stop talking. But oh, Dita, can't you try and patch it up?" Her words gave fresh impetus to Perdita's gradually decreasing sobs. "You do not know him," she wept, "and to tell the truth, neither do I; but I have enough of an understanding of him to know that he always considers a step very thoroughly before he takes it, looks well into the chasm before he leaps, and it's no use trying to get him to change his mind when he has decided what course he means to pursue. Anyway, I do not wish it. I want to be free, but not this way. Oh, was ever a woman placed in such a position as I? I believe Cresswell would forgive anything but the sin of not knowing one's own mind and I had to confess to him last night that I wasn't sure of mine or of my heart either. He has a contempt for me, of course, and," rising restlessly and moving about, "I can't and won't accept his contempt, and I can't and won't continue to live on his money and potter about his old houses. I feel as if I would rather die."