"We've been here quite a long while," she answered. "Please, I want to go home now." CHAPTER XXI IN THE DARK An hour or so later Miss Winthrop lay in her bed, where, with the door tight locked and the gas out, she could feel just the way she felt like feeling and it was nobody's business. She cried because she wished to cry. She cried because it was the easiest and most satisfactory way she knew of relieving the tenseness in her throat. She burrowed her face in the pillow and cried hard, and then turned over on her pig-tails and sobbed awhile. It did not make any difference, here in the dark, whether the tears made lines down her face or not--whether or not they made her eyes red, and, worst of all, her nose red. From sobbing, Miss Winthrop dwindled to sniveling, and there she stopped. She was not the kind to snivel very long--even by herself. She did not like the sound of it. So she took her wadded handkerchief and jammed it once into each eye and jabbed once at each cheek, and then, holding it tight in her clenched fist, made up her mind to stop. For a minute or two an occasional sob broke through spasmodically; but finally even that ceased, and she was able to stare at the ceiling quite steadily. By that time she was able to call herself a little fool, which was a very good beginning for rational thinking. There was considerable material upon which to base a pretty fair argument along this line. Admitting that Don Pendleton was what she had been crying about,--a purely hypothetical assumption for the sake of a beginning,--she was able to start with the premise that a woman was a fool for crying about any man. Coming down to concrete facts, she found herself supplied with even less comforting excuses. If she had been living of late in a little fool's paradise, why, she had made it for herself. She could not accuse him of having any other part in it than that of merely being there. If she went back a month, or three months, or almost a year, she saw herself either taking the initiative or, what was just as bad, passively submitting. Of course, her motive had been merely to help him in an impersonal sort of way. She had seen that he needed help, but she had not dreamed the reason for it. She had no warning that he had been deserted by her who should have helped him. She had no way of knowing about this other. Surely that ignorance was not her fault.