She kept on toward the hotel, but her step lagged. What did she care who saw her now? Surely, she reassured herself, he was not leaving for good--like this. It was certainly strange. Entering the hotel through the unlocked office door she found the night lamp still burning and Terriberry was nowhere about. That was curious, for he was always up when any of his guests were leaving on the early train. Van Lennop's decision must have been sudden. What could be the explanation? There was a letter propped against the lamp on a table behind the office desk and, as she surmised, it was addressed to Mr. Terriberry in Van Lennop's handwriting. Looking closer she saw the end of a second envelope behind the first. To whom could he have written? In some respects Dr. Harpe had the curiosity of a servant and it now prompted her to walk behind the desk and gratify it. "Miss Essie Tisdale" was the address on the second envelope. Instantly her face changed and the swift, jealous rage of the evening before swept over her again. She ground her teeth together as she regarded the letter with malice glittering in her heavy eyes. He was writing to her, then, the little upstart, that infernal little biscuit-shooter! Shorty, the cook, was rattling the kitchen range. She listened a moment. There was no other sound. She thrust the letter quickly beneath the line of her low-cut bodice and tiptoed up the stairs with slinking, feline stealth. XIX "DOWN AND OUT" Dr. Harpe ripped open the envelope addressed to Essie Tisdale and devoured its contents standing by the window, bare-shouldered in the dawn. Long before she had finished reading her hand shook with excitement, and her nose looked pinched and drawn about the nostrils. As a matter of fact the woman was being dealt a staggering blow. Until the moment she had not herself realized how strongly she had built upon the outcome of this self-constructed romance of hers. In her wildest dreams she had not considered Van Lennop's attentions to Essie Tisdale serious or, indeed, his motives good. That Ogden Van Lennop had entertained the remotest notion of asking Essie Tisdale to be his wife was furthest from her thoughts. Yet there it was in black and white, staring at her in words which burned themselves upon her brain, searing the deeper because she learned from them that her own deed had precipitated the crisis. "I wasn't sure of myself until last night," Van Lennop wrote, "but that creature's disgraceful act left me in no doubt. If I had been sure of _you_, Essie Tisdale, I would have put my arm about you then and there and told that braying crowd that any indignity offered you was offered to my future wife.