"But he has retired."
"Nevertheless I must see him!"
"Why?"
"He knows."
"But my dear Miss Carew, surely you are upset; surely Mr. Cullen does not know—"
Ethel interrupted this by putting her hand upon the knob and trying the door, only to find it locked. She ceased to argue and went away.
When she returned to her room and threw herself across her bed, it was without thought of sleep.
"They've done it—they've done it," she repeated again and again to herself, without yet daring to allow any closer defining of "it." But whatever it was, "it" was done. Here in the house with her were two who had planned or had part in "it"; and one of them was her grandfather.
She heard him descend from the garret and go into his room; she heard him open the door of the stove in his room; she even heard—or fancied that she heard—the roar of flames in the stove consuming papers. But now she made no move. "It" was done; and whatever she might attempt could not undo it; she could only—do what?
Her mind halted at thinking of that and returned her to feelings, feelings new to her that day, emotions and sensations stirred wondrously and delightfully by Barney Loutrelle. For brief intervals she probably slept, at least she lost full consciousness in exhaustion, rousing to alarmed wakefulness in which she tried to think that all she had witnessed and felt that night must be a dream. Then passed a period in which, wide awake, she drove her mind to other thoughts: to people she knew in Wyoming, to visions of the plains, the old
