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woman's loss of chastity was a lowering of conventional masculine restraints; a loosing of the men upon her.

But presently her thoughts returned to Mrs. Roxie Biggers again, to the charitable old woman who had always befriended the stricken and the weak. Her fancy turned to the old Samaritan with a kind of yearning faith.

She was stuffing her slippers, hose, and underwear into her trunk, utilizing for the smaller articles the space between her novels; the pure benign novels which had never contemplated for their heroines any such desperate disgrace as this.

As she touched the books and sensed their tenor, her own falling away from the rôle of heroine filled her with shame and dismay. It seemed to Nessie that she would give her every possession on earth if she could reinstate herself in that perfect sphere where once her imagination moved. She still did not suspect that in essence it was an impossible sphere; that there were no such lives.

As she worked, the check for her month's salary which Mr. Baxter had given her appeared on her table in the mysterious way such objects have of appearing and disappearing in the hands of a careless person. It demanded some sort of disposal. Nessie took it up and looked at it. She needed the money on it, but the mere thought of taking it to the bank and getting it cashed daunted her. She could not take it to the bank with the whole village watching her and thinking that she had been first discharged from the Grand and then driven from her boarding house. The check was for seventy-five dollars.

Again Mrs. Biggers entered her mind as one who would assist her in getting the check cashed. She finished packing, pondering how she could get to the Biggers home. She could slip out of the hotel at about six o'clock when the village was at supper. The streets would be almost deserted then.

As she closed the lid of her trunk there came a faint tapping at her door. The girl looked around defensively and was surprised to see it was John, the Negro chore boy, who unac-