“He will lend me the money,” said Lois, with a grateful, touching confidence that seemed to shut out every conventional, every worldly suggestion, and to breathe only of her need and the willingness of a friend to help—not alone for the need’s sake, but for hers. Dosia tried to picture Eugene Larue as Lois must see him; his bearded lips, his worn forehead, his quiet, sad, piercing eyes, were not attractive to her. The whole thing was very bewildering. It was twenty miles, a forty-minute ride, to Haledon, where they changed cars for the little branch road that went past Collingswood—a signal station, as the conductor who punched their tickets impressed on Lois. Haledon itself was a junction for many lines, with a crowd of people on the platform continually coming and going under the electric lights. As Lois and Dosia waited for their train, an automobile dashed up, and a man and a woman, getting out of it with wraps and bundles, took their place among those who were waiting for the westbound express. The woman, large and elegantly gowned, had something familiar in her outline as she turned to her companion, a short, ferret-faced man with a fair mustache—the man who lately had been seen everywhere with Mrs. Leverich. Yes, it was Mrs. Leverich. Dosia shrank back into the shadow. The light struck full athwart the large, full-blown face of Myra as she turned to the man caressingly with some remark; his eyes, evilly cognizant, smiled back again as he answered, with his cigar between his teeth. Dosia felt that old sensation of burning shame—she had seen something that should have been hidden in darkness. They were going off together. All those whispers about Mrs. Leverich had been true. There were only a few people in the shaky, rattling little car when Lois and Dosia entered it, whizzing off, a moment later, down a lonely road with wooded hills sloping to the track on one side and a wooded brook on the other. The air grew aromatic in the chill spring dusk with the odor of damp fern and pine. Both women were silent, and the baby, rolled in his long cloak, slept all the way. It was but seven miles to Collingswood, yet the time seemed longer than all the rest of the journey before they were finally dumped out at the little empty station with the hills towering above it. A youth was just locking up the ticket-office and going off as they reached it. Dosia ran after him. “Mr. Larue’s place is near here, isn’t it?” she called. “Yes, over there to the right,” said the youth, pointing down the board walk, which seemed to end at nowhere, “about a quarter of a mile down. You’ll know when you come to the gates. They’re big iron ones.” “Isn’t there any way of riding?” “I guess not,” said the youth, and disappeared into the woods on a bicycle. “Oh, it will be only a step,” said Lois, starting off in the direction indicated, followed perforce by Dosia with the hand-bag, both walking in silence.