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THAT night, when Abner went to bed at the Sandages', his thoughts and emotions were filled with Adelaide Jones. Certainly she was the most unusual girl he had ever met. Her conversation with him had been as one man with another. She had not said anything particularly reprehensible, he pondered under his blankets, but still she had an air about her. On the drive back she had mentioned casually the number of children she meant to have. "That was a hell of a thing for a girl to say," he thought, more than half insulted, "'goin' to have six children'."

The young man fell asleep thinking about Adelaide, and after the irrational fashion of sleep drifted into a disagreeable dream of Nessie Sutton. Once or twice he started awake during the night and thumped the hot pillow under his head in an effort to beat away the vision of this woman who haunted him. Why did he dream of Nessie? It seemed to Abner that the milliner had died when she married Belshue. Nessie Belshue—he mused on her new name in the darkness. There was something funereal and bitter in it. The change of name was symbolic of the change in the woman. Nessie Sutton, the sweet simple girl whom he had known and whom he had loved so passionately and confusedly, was dead to him indeed.

He fell asleep in the gray of the morning and was awakened, it appeared to him, but a moment later by Aline, the Negro maid, calling him through the door, with disdain tincturing her tones, that the telephone wanted him.

Abner arose and hurried on his clothes without bathing, for, like Jim, he instinctively avoided the bathroom.