"It's only puttin' off vhat's got to happen _some_time," Max argued. "This town's no place for a girl like you." He leaned toward her, but she drew, reluctantly, away. What might be well by day may well seem ill by night. "Wait till to-morrow, anyhow," she urged.--But to-morrow, she wondered, how should she explain her afternoon away from school? Max considered. "All righd," he at last nodded. "Go home un' think things ofer vith yourself; but I'll be chust as ready to-morrow as I am to-day. You've got to get avay from all this ugliness. Remember that, un' remember I hafn't been _fresh_, un' I vant righd now to marry you. I hafn't efen tried to kiss you. Think of that, un' think that I'll be vaitin' up at the hotel, in case of drouble, till _mid_nighd." He wheeled at that, and left her. Ten minutes later--at a quarter to seven, so rapidly had the drama unrolled itself--she had reached home to find that Etta had been there before her. Denbigh, on the early morning shift that week, was already in bed, but her mother tossed the truant into the parlor and locked both doors while she went up stairs to waken him. He came down at once, in his nightshirt, roaring. He turned the key and flung wide the door. The room, however, was empty, and the window open. Mary and Max were already together, hurrying through the warm spring evening toward the trolley-car that was to carry them on the first stage of their journey to New York. III THE SPECTER OF FEAR A sixteen an angry and frightened girl running away from a home where the necessity for work must cheat her youth of its just rights--at sixteen such a girl cannot analyze her emotions, and Mary's were in sheer panic. She had never before been farther from her own town than the ten miles' distant county-seat, had never before been at more than verbal odds with her parents. Philadelphia had stood for the City of Lanterns, and a quick retort for revolution. Now she was bound for New York and marriage. There was none of the few persons on the trolley-car that knew her, yet she kept her face to the window and away from them. There was no chance of capture, yet she trembled whenever the brakes creaked and a new passenger came aboard. It might, perhaps, be truly said that she did not feel at all, and that the power of poignant realization was still paralyzed by her own action. It was as if she had amputated a portion of her spiritual being, and wras still numb from the shock.