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and Nessie recalled with painful clearness that other night in the Scovell House, ages ago, it seemed, when he had kissed her and when Miss Scovell had warned her against him. Now his pity, his sympathy, his caresses wrung at the overwrought girl, but still she pushed away from him, moved now by her inherent truthfulness.

"But—but, listen, Mr. Belshue—what are you going to do with me?"

"Marry you, Nessie, if you will let me."

"Marry me!" she echoed in a ghastly tone.

He patted her shoulder gently.

"Mr. Belshue—Mr. Belshue—you—you kain't marry me. . . . I—I'm a ruined girl."

Came a silence; the pressure of the jeweller's arms on her shoulder and waist did not relax.

"You are not, Nessie," he said in a moved voice, "but you may become so unless somebody helps you."

"Oh, but I am, I am!" sobbed the girl piteously. "I—I—he—Ab—" but at the first syllable of her lover's name something seemed to lock in her throat.

The lonely man drew her to him with a profound tenderness, caressing her cheek, her hair.

"No man can ruin a woman, Nessie," he whispered in her ear. "The people do that."

At the entrance of a little side alley on the main street of the village a man and a woman entered an automobile just as the locomotive pulled away from the station that evening. As the puffs of the engine smote the night, came the whirring of the car's self-starter; a moment later the motor whispered and the headlights spurted up the dark shabby street. Automobile and train moved off through the night on their separate ways.