"We'd studied together in the same classes at the Wheatley School. And people had said we looked alike. But she was born for that sort of life, for success. As I went down, step by step, she went up. He wrote me that I must be getting famous, for he'd seen my picture on a magazine-cover. It was hers. I pretended it was mine. I pretended I was doing the things she was doing. I let them believe I'd taken a new name, a stage name. I sent them papers that told of her success. I became a cheat, an impostor, a living lie--I _became Harriet Walter_!" At last the light had come. I saw everything in a flash. I suddenly realized the perplexities and profundities of human life. I felt shaken by a sudden pity for these two bound and unhappy spirits, at that moment so close together, yet groping so foolishly and perversely along their mole-like trails. I was still thinking of the irony of it all, of the two broken and lonely young lives even at that moment under the same roof, crushed under the weight of their unseeing and uncomprehending misery, when the girl in the chair began to speak again. "It was terrible," she went on, in her passionate resolve to purge her soul of the whole corroding blight. "I didn't dream what it would lead to, what it would cause. I dreaded every advance she made. It wasn't jealousy, it was more than that; it was fear, terror. She seemed to be feeding on me, day by day, month by month. I knew all the time that the higher she got the lower I had to sink. And now, in a different way, she's taken everything from me. Taken everything, without knowing it!" "No, you're wrong there," I said. "She hasn't taken everything." "What is there left?" was her forlorn query. "Life--all your real life. This has been a sort of nightmare, but now it's over. Now you can go back and begin over again." "It's too late!" She clasped her thin hands hopelessly together. "And there's no one to go to." "_There's Mallory_," I said, waiting for some start as the name fell on her ears. But I saw none. "No," she cried, "he'd hate and despise me." "But you still care for him?" I demanded. "I need him," she sobbingly acknowledged. "Yes--yes, I always cared for him. But he'd never understand. He'd never forgive me. He's grown away from me." "He's waiting for you," I said. I stood looking at the bowed figure for a moment. Then I slipped out of the room. I stepped in through my own door and closed it after me. Young Mallory, with his watch in his hand, swung about from the window and faced me. "Well, it's ten o'clock--and nothing's settled!" "It is settled," was my answer. I led him across the quiet hall to the half-lit back room. I saw his startled and groping motion. Then I heard his cry of "Harrie!" and her answering cry of "Jamie" as the white face, with its hunger and its happiness, looked up into his.