“I wonder if it would be painful. I don’t want to suffer,” she said to herself, with keen physical shrinking, while her active mind pictured the scene when they should come to seek her and find her cold and dead--her cruel father, fickle Arthur, and his revengeful mother, who, for the sake of an old-time wrong, was willing to break two fond young hearts. What keen remorse would pierce their hearts when they saw that they had driven her to desperation and death! Perhaps they would repent when it was all too late. At the moving thought, Cinthia dissolved into floods of tears. She knelt down by a chair, with her head on her arm, and heavy sobs shook her slight frame like a reed in the wind. She cried out that she wished she had never seen Arthur Varian, who had taught her the sweet meaning of love only to make her more lonely and wretched than she had been before. But a rap on the door made her start up in alarm and hastily dash away her tears before she opened it to a white-clad waiter bearing a tray containing a dainty breakfast, which he arranged on a little table, then withdrew. Then Cinthia, in spite of her grief, discovered that she was unromantically hungry. On yesterday, while sulking in her chamber at home she had refused food all day, and on the train last night had only taken some fruit. The appetizing aroma of hot rolls, broiled birds, and steaming chocolate began to appeal to her irresistibly, and she ended by drawing up a chair and making a tolerable meal for a girl who thought her heart was broken and was actually contemplating suicide. She did not feel half so morbid when she finished her chocolate. Life was bitter still, but death did not seem so desirable. Her first temptation to suicide changed to a thought of flight. “What if I should slip away and hide myself in the great world, where they could never find me again? I might make a career for myself, become a great actress, maybe, and when they saw me successful on the stage, they would think I had forgotten cruel Arthur, as I wish them to do, for I would not have him think I love him still,” she thought, bitterly, her mind running on novels she had read in which romantic girls, thrown alone on the world, had encountered wonderful adventures, and finally carved their names on the rock of love. Cinthia was utterly wretched and despairing, and in the mood for anything reckless. She flung on her hat and jacket, and turned toward the door. She was actually going to venture out into the world alone, a desperate victim whom fate had used most cruelly, and who longed to escape from everything she had known into some new, untried sphere. She had no idea where she was going. She would escape into the street, and wander aimlessly up and down with the busy throngs; that was just now her only thought. She stretched out her hand to the door-knob, and at the instant a light rap on the outside startled her.