"What has happened, child? Tell me, quick! I am nearly dead with worry. Are you all right?" "Of course, mamma. I----" "But _where_ are you? Where were you all night? Are you sure everything is all right?" Never had Gloria known her extremely clear-headed mother to be so wildly disturbed, so nervously incoherent. "I have told you I am all right. I am up in the mountains, at our log house. Didn't Mr. Gratton tell you----?" "Mr. Gratton?" Mrs. Gaynor was only more mystified. "He has told me nothing; I haven't seen him. I tried to phone him--oh, I have phoned everybody we know!--and he is out of town, and----" But Gloria, panic-stricken by something her mother had said, cried: "You have phoned _everybody!_ Oh, mamma! What--_what_ do you mean?" "When you didn't come in last night--I have been crazy with worry! I thought you might be spending the night with one of your friends; I thought that maybe something had happened and it was being kept from me. I rang up Georgia Stark and Mildred Carter and the Farrilees--and even the emergency hospitals. I thought----" The rest was only a meaningless buzzing in Gloria's ears; she sat speechless herself, bereft of all reason for a dull moment, then harbouring quick, clear thoughts, as swift, as vivid as lightning, and in the end as blinding by their very quality of blazing light. _The newspapers!_ Still, dominated subconsciously by the thought which had brought her to the telephone, Gloria managed before the connection was broken to beg her mother to come immediately to her at the log house; to tell every one that Gloria was with her father. Her mother promised; began asking questions, and Gloria said a bleak "good-bye" and hung up. _The newspapers_. She sat there staring into space and seeing the San Francisco _Chronicle_ and _Examiner_, hawked by newsboys, on stands, thrust under doors, going like spreading snowflakes of a big storm into post-offices, to racing trains, all over the land. Her mother had telephoned the emergency hospitals! Gloria could have wept in rage, screamed, thrown herself down and given over to paroxysms of weeping. But she only sat on, her face whiter and whiter, looking into emptiness and seeing headlines that towered as high as immense black cliffs. Her mother had telephoned Mildred Carter, that hateful, hateful, thrice-hateful Mildred Carter; had confessed that Gloria had gone out with Mr. Gratton; was gone all night, no one knew where; Mildred Carter who was as good as married to Bob Dwight of the _Chronicle_! And the emergency hospitals--Gloria with never a tear coming in her hour of greatest distress sat rocking back and forth on her chair, crying: "Oh, I wish I were dead!"