This was but an excuse to get away, to be alone. Leaving the sentence unfinished, she fled. A moment later she was in the east wing, where her personal belongings had been banished by the usurper. Some one--Kirk, no doubt--had tried to hang her pictures in the same position they had occupied in the beloved room that had been hers for so long. An effort had been made to make things appear the same, but they were not the same; they would never be the same. Here she felt a stranger, almost like a guest in a transient hotel. Nothing would ever be the same--now. Bates had already brought up her bags, and they were stacked in an orderly pile on the floor, but Joan made no move to unpack. That had been but an excuse. She stumbled toward her bed and flung herself across it, giving way to a torrent of tears. "I love him so!" she sobbed. "It never would have happened--if I hadn't gone away. I know it wouldn't have happened. No other woman has a right to him when I love him so much." Presently she got herself in check and went listlessly to the window and, lifting back the curtains, looked out. From here she had not so much as a glimpse of the Tappan Zee, where the Hudson broadens a good three miles wide. In her old room, curled up in the window seat, with soft pillows at her back, she had been able to look out across the water to the rugged rise of the Palisades looming up picturesquely from the New Jersey shore--and dream. And now in that other room--her room--would be Kirklan's wife! Perhaps the other woman and Kirklan would sit in her beloved window seat, his arm about her; the thought of it made the blood pound in Joan's brain, made a red mist swim before her eyes. Below her a figure moved across the lawn, a graceful figure in a white sport skirt. Even from that distance the woman's bronze hair glinted in the strong sunlight. Joan stared down, her hands clenching until the nails bit deep into her palms. "She has taken two of the things I have loved best!" she whispered fiercely. "I hate her! I can't help it, I hate her!" CHAPTER II THE SQUALID HOUSE Relic of the horse-and-carriage days was the Gilmore stable, with living quarters for the now obsolete coachman and footman. Kirklan Gilmore, that he might have more detachment and quiet than the house afforded, had remodeled the stable into a studio, and here it was that he did his writing. Success in anything means hard work, and authorship is no exception. Being a successful novelist, he was a hard worker, but for weeks now, except for a mildly curious visit by Helen, who had been frankly disappointed in the unpretentiousness of her husband's workshop, the place had been locked. The manuscript of the new novel, for which his publishers waited fretfully, lay untouched and uncompleted.