A bargain-table of odds and ends of woollen jackets, golf vests, and old fashioned blouse sweaters, selling off at a dollar apiece, solved the problem of a wrap.  She selected a dark blouse, of an ugly, purply blue, but thick and warm.  Then with her precious packages she asked a pleasant-faced saleswoman if there were any place near where she could slip on a walking skirt she had just bought to save her other skirt from the muddy streets.  She was ushered into a little fitting-room near by.  It was only about four feet square, with one chair and a tiny table, but it looked like a palace to the girl in her need, and as she fastened the door and looked at the bare painted walls that reached but a foot or so above her head and had no ceiling, she wished with all her heart that such a refuge as this might be her own somewhere in the great, wide, fearful world.

Rapidly she slipped off her fine, silk-lined cloth garments, and put on the stiff sateen waist and the coarse black skirt.  Then she surveyed herself, and was not ill pleased.  There was a striking lack of collar and belt.  She sought out a black necktie and pinned it about her waist, and then, with a protesting frown, she deliberately tore a strip from the edge of one of the fine hem-stitched handkerchiefs, and folded it in about her neck in a turn-over collar.  The result was quite startling and unfamiliar.  The gown, the hair, the hat, and the neat collar gave her the look of a young nurse-girl or upper servant.  On the whole, the disguise could not have been better.  She added the blue woollen blouse, and felt certain that even her most intimate friends would not recognize her.  She folded the rain-coat, and placed it smoothly in the suit-case, then with dismay remembered that she had nothing in which to put her own cloth dress, save the few inadequate paper wrappings that had come about her simple purchases.  Vainly she tried to reduce the dress to a bundle that would be covered by the papers.  It was of no use.  She looked down at the suit-case.  There was room for the dress in there, but she wanted to send Mr. Dunham’s property back at once.  She might leave the dress in the store, but some detective with an accurate description of that dress might be watching, find it, and trace her.  Besides, she shrank from leaving her garments about in public places.  If there had been any bridge near at hand where she might unobserved throw the dress into a dark river, or a consuming fire where she might dispose of it, she would have done it.  But whatever she was to do with it must be done at once.  Her destiny must be settled before the darkness came down.  She folded the dress smoothly and laid it in the suit-case, under the rain-coat.

She sat down at a writing-desk, in the waiting-room, and wrote:  “I am safe, and I thank you.”  Then she paused an instant, and with nervous haste wrote “Mary” underneath.  She opened the suit-case and pinned the paper to the lapel of the evening coat.  Just three dollars and sixty-seven cents she had left in her pocket-book after paying the expressage on the suit-case.