Listlessly she read the messages, as the report for the fifth Aqueduct event of the afternoon began to flash in and the announcer cried out, “They’re off!” Dreamily she interpreted the snatches of information as they came in over the wire: “Scotch Heather leads, with White-Legs second!” “Scotch Heather still leading at the quarter, and Heart’s Desire pressing White-Legs close.” “Heart’s Desire leads at the half, with the Duke of Kendall second.” “White-Legs, the Duke of Kendall, and Heart’s Desire bunched at the turn.” “Duke of Kendall holds the rail, with Heart’s Desire and White-Legs locked for second place.” Then, for a minute or two, silence took possession of the little brass sounder. Then thrilled out the news: “_The Duke of Kendall wins!_” Frances quietly waited, amid the hubbub and crowding and commotion, until the wire report had been duly verified and the full returns posted. Then, when the little window of the paying clerk slid open for the making of settlements, she deposited her ticket, and quietly asked to have it in hundreds. Her slip read for two hundred dollars on the Duke of Kendall at odds of fifty to one. “I guess this shop shuts up mighty soon, on this kind of runnin’,” said the paying clerk sourly, after consulting with his chief, and flinging her money through his little wicket at her. She counted it methodically, amid the gasps and little envious murmurs of the women at her elbow, and then hurried from the room. “Well, you ought to be happier-looking!” snarled a painted woman with solitaire diamond earrings, as Frances hurried down the half-lighted stairway to the street. There the woman who ought to be happy signaled moodily for a taxi-cab, and drove straight to Durkin’s apartments. She flung the pile of bills at him, in a heap before his astonished eyes. “There it is,” she said, with shaking hands and quivering lips, flashing at him a look in which he could see hatred, contempt, self-disgust and infinite unhappiness. “There it is!” she called out to him, shrilly. “There it is—all you wanted, at last, and I _hope it will make you happy_!” She tore the veil she had dragged from her head between her two distraught hands and flung it from her, and then fell in the other’s arms and wept on his shoulder like a tired child, convulsively, bitterly, hopelessly. CHAPTER XXIII “Helen can not possibly sail tomorrow.”