“I wish I was dead!” she groaned in her tearless despair and dread of to-morrow. She felt a terrible loneliness, a feeling that there was no one on earth to whom she could turn for help or pity in this dark, dark hour when all the joy of her life had fallen to her feet in ruins. She rose, pacing up and down the floor with interlocked hands and blazing eyes. Half crazed with the sudden shock of trouble, Viola’s thoughts took a sudden, desperate turn, paltered with an awful temptation. She murmured hollowly: “I can not bear my pain and live! Death were better.” Death would still the aching of the weary head, the throbbing of the tortured heart, save her from tomorrow. If she could only die, the secret of her cruel humiliation would die with her--neither Philip Desha nor Florian Gay would dare stand up in the face of the pitying world and say: “I drove poor Viola to her death.” They would be ashamed and afraid of condemnation. Remorse would seize their hearts, their old love would return and overwhelm them with grief. If she only could get some morphine, she could soon end her sorrow. Death would come gently, painlessly. When they called her in the morning she would not answer, her soul would have slipped away gently in the night. They would dress her in the beautiful bridal gown, cover her coffin with flowers, and lay her in the earth, weeping for the fair young life so untimely ended. Viola sobbed aloud at this moving picture; but it did not deter her from the grim resolve that took possession of her distraught mind. Stealing unnoticed to her room, she slipped on a warm seal-skin jacket and donned a cap to match, drawing a close veil over her face. Then slipping down to a rear entrance, she left the house unperceived, by a gate the servants used, intent on reaching the drug store on the corner to procure the morphine. Her face was deathly pale, her lips writhed in pain, her eyes gleamed wildly with her desperate purpose to baffle fate that used her so cruelly. She did not observe as she closed the gate that a gentleman had run down the steps of her home and walked briskly to the corner, waiting there for an electric car. It was a quiet street and seemingly deserted this cold March night, so that he observed with surprise the slender, graceful figure flitting before him, noting with a start that it looked like Miss Van Lew. She darted into the drug store, and curiosity made him draw near the door to satisfy his doubts. He heard the sweet musical voice, to whose tender songs he had listened in rapture every day, asking in hoarse, unnatural accents for morphine, and then the answer of the clerk who said that he could not sell such a dangerous drug without a doctor’s prescription. Viola turned silently and went out into the street, passing Rolfe Maxwell without perceiving him, in the absorption of her misery.