"At twenty I should not even have trembled," she said to herself, sinking back into the cushioned seat and watching the lights of the streets flash past the window with a comforting emotion of speed. "Now it is different. Every life has one supreme opportunity—this is mine. I know it." Had a woman been at her side instead of Beecher, she would have given her confidence in the terrible necessity for sharing the emotion that was too vital to her. As it was, she restrained herself, remaining silent by a last effort of her will, but her hand on the window-frame began a nervous syncopated beating, imitating the click of the fleeing rails which one hears on a railroad train. "You are feeling better?" said the young man in a troubled voice. "Open the window—just for a moment," she answered. The sudden blast of cold air, damp as though laden with the tears of the city, terrified her with its suggestion of despair and defeat. "No, no, shut it!" she said hurriedly. He obeyed and then to distract her, began: "I received your note, Rita, just before coming, McKenna—" "No, no," she said, interrupting him, "that is nothing. Just let me be quiet a moment—get hold of myself." But in a few moments she was forced to seek the stimulus of the air again, and she cried hurriedly, not concealing her agitation: "Open, open quick!" The crisis which she felt approaching with every block which fell behind was so immense, the stake so ardently coveted, so weakly feared, that she had in the last eternal waiting moments a sensation of vertigo, that swept down and seized her even as on the football field before the blowing of the whistle the stanchest player feels his heart lying before him on the ground. She opened her lips, drinking in the chill, revivifying draught, unaware of the strange impression her disordered countenance in the embrasure of the window made on the occasional passers-by. "Better first in a village than second in Rome." She found herself repeating the saying mechanically, without quite understanding how it had so suddenly leaped into her mind. Then, as the automobile turned into her street, and she felt that he was there waiting as he had promised, successful or ruined; that now in ten minutes all would be over, she would know; all at once, without that sense of humor which deserts us in great stress, she began to pray confusedly to some one immense, whom she had never understood, but one who seemed to hold all fates in the balancing of his fingers. "Are you better? What shall I do? Shall I come up with you?" asked Beecher, totally in the dark. "No, no—wait," she said hurriedly, as the machine ground to a stop. She did not rise at once, stiffening in her seat, grasping the arm of the young man until he winced under the contraction of her fingers. "Good!" she said suddenly; and before he could prevent her she was out on the sidewalk. "No, no; stay in. Thanks, thanks a thousand times. I’ll send you back."