Gail smiled retrospectively, and tried the blue light under the canopy lamp, but turned it out immediately. The green gave a much better effect of moonlight on the floor.

She called herself back out of the mists of her previous distress. Who was this Gail, and what was she? There had come a new need in her, a new awakening. Something seemed to have changed in her, to have crystallised. Whatever this crystallisation was, it had made her know that she could not marry Howard Clemmens. It had made her know, too, that marriage was not to be looked upon as a mere inevitable social episode. Her thoughts flew back to Aunt Helen. Her eyelashes brushed her cheeks, and the little smile of sarcasm twitched the corners of her lips.

Aunt Helen’s list of eligibles. Gail reviewed them now deliberately; not with the thought of the social advantages they might offer her, but as men. She reviewed others whom she had met. For the first time in her life, she was frankly and self-consciously interested in men; curious about them. She had reached her third stage of development; the fairy prince age, the “I suppose I shall have to be married one day” age, and now the age of conscious awakening. She wondered, in some perplexity, as to what had brought about her nascence; rather, and she knitted her pretty brows, who had brought it about.

The library clock chimed the hour, and startled her out of her reverie. She turned on the lights, and sat in front of her mirror to give her hair one of those extra brushings for which it was so grateful, and which it repaid with so much beauty. She paused deliberately to study herself in the glass. Why, this was a new Gail, a more potent Gail. What was it Allison had said about her potentialities? Allison. Strong, forceful, aggressive Allison. He was potence itself. A thrill of his handclasp clung with her yet, and a slight flush crept into her cheeks.

Aunt Grace had worried about Jim’s little cold, and the distant mouse she thought she heard, and the silver chest, and Lucile’s dangerous looking new horse, until all these topics had failed, when she detected the unmistakable click of a switch-button near by. It must be in Gail’s suite. Hadn’t the child retired yet? She lay quite still pondering that mighty question for ten minutes, and then, unable to rest any longer, she slipped out of bed and across the hall. There was no light coming from under the doors of either the boudoir or the bedroom, so Aunt Grace peeped into the latter apartment, then she tiptoed softly away. Gail, in her cascade of pink flufferies, was at the north window, kneeling, with her earnest face upturned to one bright pale star.

CHAPTER VIII
STILL PIECING OUT THE WORLD

The map of the United States in Edward E. Allison’s library began, now, to develop little streaks of red. They were not particularly long streaks, but they were boldly marked, and they hugged, with extraordinary closeness, the pencil mark which Allison had drawn from New York to Chicago and from Chicago to San Francisco. There were long gaps between them, but these did not seem to worry him very much. It was the little stretches, sometimes scarcely over an inch, which he drew with such evident pleasure from day to day, and now, occasionally, as he passed in and out, he stopped by the big globe and gave it a contemplative whirl. On the day he joined his far western group of little marks by bridging three small gaps, he received a caller in the person of a short, well-dressed, old man, who walked with a cane and looked half asleep, by reason of the many puffs which had piled up under his eyes and nearly closed them.

“I’m ready to wind up, Tim,” remarked Allison, offering his caller a cigar, and lighting one himself. “When can we have that Vedder Court property condemned?”

“Whenever you give the word,” reported Tim Corman, who spoke with an asthmatic voice, and with the quiet dignity of a man who had borne grave business responsibilities, and had borne them well.

Allison nodded his head in satisfaction.