She knew at once whose letter it was; no need to look! She clutched it, hiding it against her dress. Betty, clinging to her skirts, indignant at her change of mood, clamored for recognition. She bent over, kissed her swiftly, laughed. Then she was alone. She looked at the letter, but she did not open it. Instead, she placed it on a table, locked the doors, and clutching her hands until the nails cut in, began to pace the floor. If he had dared--to seek another meeting! She felt a hot indignant anger wrapping her whole body. She would show him her scorn! At one moment she was on the point of tearing up the letter unread, at the next of sending it back contemptuously. At the end she opened it and read: "_Dear Miss Baxter_: "I was out of my head.... I should have known my limitations.... I didn't. I am very sorry, and I only am to blame. Some later day I want to be your good friend.... Do you understand? "With great respect, "L. M." When she had read this unexpected renunciation, she forgot all her anger, all her resistance. "He will never see me again!" she said, with a sob, pressing the letter convulsively against her tears. She needed no second reading to understand that. She put the crumpled sheet into her waist, striking her temples with her little fists as she had once struck him, repeating: "Never!" In this moment she no longer had any doubts. She loved him madly, with an intensity that obliterated everything else. And now all this must be strangled; for, in her strange self-formed morality, such a love was unthinkable. The only man who had known how to take her, to see through her acting, to reach out roughly, brutally, like a master--this man belonged to another woman;--was barred to her forever! "What have I done? Why--why should I be punished this way?" Suddenly she seized a chair, and dragging it to the side window, sat down, her chin in her hands, staring through the glass at the sheer blankness of brick only a few feet away. It was beginning to be dusk. She felt herself caught; she yielded everything. The thought of pain was so abhorrent to her nature, she had always rushed so fearfully from the contact of suffering, that, now when she was caught without escape, everything crumbled. In this abject moment, as her body yielded to the pervading process of the dusk, she turned back over the entangled progress of her life, convinced that she was paying fearfully in retribution for selfishness and wickedness. Life, which rises out of the past in its naked proportions only when we dumbly seek a reason for the calamity that overwhelms us, came thus to her as a conviction. What had happened must be her punishment.