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 never try to do any one a good turn again as long as I live. Fanny was perfectly right.”

The letter came by the second post, when Maisie was engaged in drearily reading her employer to sleep after lunch.

It lay on her lap, but she kept her eyes from it and read on intelligibly if not with expression.

The old lady dozed.

Maisie opened her letter. And before she could even have had time to put up a hand to save herself, her Spanish castle was tumbling about her ears. A curious giddy feeling seemed to catch at the back of her neck, the room gave a sickening half-turn. She caught at her self-control.

“Not here. I mustn’t faint here. Not with his letter in my hand.”

She got out of the room somehow, and somehow she got into hat and jacket and boots, put her quarter’s salary in her purse, and walked out of the front door and straight down the great drive that she had come up four months ago with such bright hopes. She went to the station, and she took a train, and she never stopped nor stayed till she was at home again. She pushed past the frightened maid, and, pale and shabby, with