First, Helen gathered all the cash she had in the house, not forgetting the baby's bank (which yielded the biggest sum of all), and counted it. She had nineteen dollars and seventeen cents. Then she rummaged among her husband's letters and papers until she found a letter from Dr. Gleason bearing his Boston address. Next, with Bridget to help her, she flung into her trunk everything belonging to herself and the baby that it was possible to crowd in, save the garments laid out to wear. By three o'clock Bridget was paid and dismissed, and Helen, with Dorothy Elizabeth, was waiting for the carriage to take them to the railroad station. With the same tearless exaltation that had carried her through the prodigious tasks of the morning, Helen picked up her bag and Dorothy Elizabeth, and followed her trunk down the stairs and out to the street. She gave not one backward glance to the little home, and she carefully avoided anything but an airy "Good-bye" to the watching Mrs. Cobb in the window on the other side. Not until the wheels began to turn, and the journey was really begun, did Helen's tearless exaltation become the frightened anxiety of one who finds herself adrift on an uncharted sea. Then Helen began to cry. CHAPTER XI IN QUEST OF THE STARS In a roomy old house on Beacon Hill Dr. Frank Gleason made his home with his sister, Mrs. Ellery Thayer. The family were at their North Shore cottage, however, and only the doctor was at home on the night that Hawkins, the Thayers' old family butler, appeared at the library door with the somewhat disconcerting information that a young person with a baby and a bag was at the door and wished to speak to Dr. Gleason. The doctor looked up in surprise. "Me?" he questioned. "A woman? She must mean Mrs. Thayer." "She said you, sir. And she isn't a patient. I asked her, thinking she might have made a mistake and took you for a real doctor what practices. She said she didn't want doctoring. She wanted you. She's a young person I never saw before, sir." "But, good Heavens, man, it's after eleven o'clock!" "Yes, sir." On the manservant's face was an expression of lively curiosity and disapproval, mingled with a subdued but unholy mirth which was not lost on the doctor, and which particularly exasperated him. "What in thunder can a woman with a baby want of me at this time of-- What's her name?" demanded the doctor. "She didn't say, sir." "Well, go ask her." The butler coughed slightly, but made no move to leave the room. "I did ask her, sir. She declined to give it." "Declined to-- Well, I like her impertinence." "Yes, sir. She said you'd"--the servant's voice faltered and swerved ever so slightly from its well-trained impassiveness--"er--understand, sir." "She said I'd--the deuce she did!" exploded the doctor under his breath, flushing an angry red and leaping to his feet. "Didn't you tell her Mrs. Thayer was gone?" he demanded at last, wheeling savagely. "I did, sir, and--" "Well?"