This conversation occurred on a morning in his office, where she had gone on some slight business, and with concern he had noticed her tired eyes.  At his advice she brightened.

“Marcia thinks I should marry Berkeley, immediately, and let him take me away, but—­”

“But you aren’t ready to rush into matrimony just yet?” Vandervelde growled.  “I should think you wouldn’t be!  If Hadyen’s managed to exist this long without a wife, I take it for granted he can exist unwed a little longer.  You are certain you mean to marry him?”

“Oh, yes, I am certain I mean to marry him,” said Anne, flatly.  “But I—­that is, not so soon.”

“I think I understand, Anne,” said the big man, kindly.  “Look here, you just tell ’em all to wait!  Tell ’em you’re tired.  Then you pick yourself up and light out for a while, by yourself.  Chuck the madding throng and all that, Anne, and beat it for the open!”

“Oh, how I wish I could!” she sighed.  “You don’t know how I long for a chance to be just me by myself!  I want to stay with people who have never heard the name of Champneys or Hayden and who wouldn’t care if my name happened to be Mudd!  I want plain living and plain thinking and plain people.  I—­I’ll come back to—­everything I should come back to, afterward.  But first I want to be free!  Just for a little while I want to be free!”

“But how could you manage it?” mused Vandervelde.  “The lady who divorced Peter Champneys and is going to marry Berkeley Hayden can’t pick herself up ‘unbeknownst’ and hope to get away with it.  Not in these days of good reporting!  You’re copy, you understand.”

“But I don’t want to be Mrs. Peter Champneys!  I don’t want to be the woman Berkeley Hayden’s going to marry!  I want to be just me!” she cried.  “I want to go to some place where nobody’s ever heard either of those names!  Some little place where there are water and trees—­and not much else.  Like, say,—­Jason!  Do you remember that place you found, in Maine, I think?  You babbled about it.  Said you were going to go there if ever you wanted to get out of the world.  Said it was Eden before the serpent entered.  Where’s that place, Jason?  Why can’t I go there, just as myself—­” she paused, and looked at him hopefully.

“I don’t see why you can’t,” said he, cheerfully.

And so Anne, who didn’t wish to be Mrs. Peter Champneys, or the woman whom Berkeley Hayden was to marry, or anybody but herself, came to the out-of-the-way nook on the Maine shore, and was welcomed by the Widow Thatcher.

She found the place idyllic.  She liked its skies unclouded by smoke, translucent skies in which silver mountains of clouds reared themselves out of airy continents that shifted and drifted before the wind.  She liked its clean, pure, untainted air.  And she liked contact with these simple souls, men who labored, women who knew birth and death and were not afraid of either.  It came to her that her own