She wondered where the difference lay, wherein John Hartley was not like all other men. Why had she looked out on him with awakened eyes? She remembered how, at the first, that grave considerateness with which he had treated her had caused an immediate muffled fluttering in the sleeping cotes of affection. There was an answering seriousness in his steady gray eyes that had appealed to her. He was manly, and honest, and strong. Yet she knew that explained nothing. Nor did the fact that he had continuously eluded her, that in some way he stood above her in a masterfulness that caused dormant femininity ever dumbly to bow to it. And still she probed herself for reasons, and still she stood unsatisfied. Was it true, even, that she could ever be in love with him? When she leaned down and asked herself, in the mirror, that strange and disturbing question, one gray day late in September, she neither smiled nor sighed. For she tried to tell herself that it was not love, but loneliness. She, too, like Mrs. Spaulding, had never been given all that her heart desired. It was not until Cordelia had read and reread Hartley's first twenty chapters of his reconstructed version of The Unwise Virgins--and what wondrous chapters, she saw, he had made them--that her plaintive and unconfessed longing for companionship, by some strange caprice of impression, deepened into a stronger and more compelling emotion. She felt then, of a sudden, that he held the reins of her destiny in his hands. She wanted him near her. Not only in her loneliness, but also in her weakness, she needed him to lean upon. The little that she had already asked of him she would repay a thousandfold. And as the result of that day's silent questioning of herself she went in person from editor to editor, as she had never done before, with a bundle of his manuscripts. And before many days, after numerous disappointments and more than one humiliation, she succeeded in disposing of no less than five of his stories. If, as a distributer of his wares she had moments of suffering, she learned to take an incongruous joy out of them, and no word of what she passed through ever reached Hartley's ears. CHAPTER XIII THE FETTERED RELEASE She, when all her maids were gone, With her cheek upon her hand, Gazed across a terraced lawn Down a twilit valley-land Where a white road twined and curled Through the hills that barred the west, Where some unknown outland world Filled her with a strange unrest. JOHN HARTLEY, "The Valley Princess." It is the under crust of motive that is the test of the moral pie.--"The Silver Poppy." Cordelia turned the letter over and over in her hands. Something of late always depressed her when she received these letters from home, in her father's stiff, ungainly hand and his none too perfect spelling. "Poor old dad, he won't come, after all!" Cordelia found it hard to look as miserable as she ought.