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aware of how near their grievances lay together, and they looked at each other with inimical eyes. Presently the elder woman said in a strained tone, "Miss Sutton, I'll want this room after to-morrer." She had meant to say, "I'll want this room to-morror," but some weakening had granted an extra day.

It required, perhaps, two seconds for Nessie to understand that she was being turned out of the hotel. A last defensive impulse caused her to fall back on her legal rights.

"B-but, M-Miss Scovell," she protested unsteadily, "I—I paid for a week."

This faint opposition aroused the old maid's life-long sense of wrong. "It makes no diff'runce if you paid for a year!" she snapped. "A girl like you kain't stay here! Git yore things packed an' git out—prancin' off to church an' prayer meetin' an' Sunday-school ever Sunday, an' now this!" The old woman trembled from the implicit irony that this thing had happened here in her own hotel. "I'll have your trunk hauled off in the mornin', and between now an' then, I'll have yore meals sent up to you—you needn't come down to the dinin' room!"

The sentence revealed to the girl in a flash of illumination exactly how the village women looked upon her as something loathsome; something to be kept out of sight. And Nessie remembered that she herself had felt the same way toward other unfortunate women. It had seemed to Nessie then, and it seemed to Miss Scovell now, that some chemical change came over women who had sinned; their very flesh was not the same as other women's flesh; pollution was intrinsic in them; and yet now Nessie had no sensation of evil save that she was bayed at on every side; that every human being whom she saw reviled and despised her.

"Miss Scovell," she asked piteously, "where can I go?"

"Huh, you ort to know such places better'n I do!" and the landlady gave Nessie a look of hatred, turned on her heel, and with her thin dew-lapped neck held high, walked back down the hall with condemnation in her footfalls.