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came and went through her office on heavy feet that struck brutally through her consciousness. They talked and their voices were as unreal as voices heard through fever. She could not write the story Miss Bigley had ordered by mail, a story to show once again virtue triumphant. Even the little faces of her fashion plates looked peakedly back at her under her pen. Luckily, Mr. Fox, with his shrewd feminine intuition, was in New York with Professor Ripley. They had seen Jones sail. Mr. Trelawney, finding her white and speechless, brooded over her and tried to interest her in medieval thought. She began a poem to fill a four-inch space in Hearth and Home,' three stanzas of four verses each. It was so easy to do things like this, she found. She could write her poem with no more effort than sharpening a pencil. 'Lines,' she wrote for a title, and then, with the idea of deception added, 'to my absent wife.'

One verse, and she read it over with impersonal interest as though it were the work of some other person. A sudden sense almost of nausea surged over