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Nessie stared at the jeweller with her own face whitening.

"I—I told you I loved him long ago, Mr. Belshue!"

"But you always will!"

The girl was painfully moved. She pressed a smudged hand against her full breast. "I—I don't know, I—suppose so."

"A man who would mistreat you—seduce you!" cried the jeweller, "leave you helpless, about to become a mother, in the hands of a mob! drive you to the point of suicide! And I—My God, I gave up everything I had on earth for you—a business, a sort of friendship among the men. I was the only person in Irontown who did not spit on you, but somehow or other, I still felt you were pure and fine, and—I loved you, Nessie—Oh, Nessie, it seems to me mere gratitude—" He paused, miserably holding out his hands to his wife.

But the jeweller was middle-aged and had that inhuman remoteness which middle age always has for youth. The girl could not enter into his emotions at all. She began defending her lover at once.

"But you are not fair to Abner, Mr. Belshue," she gasped, "he—he was coming to Irontown to—to—take me away the night the mob wh-whipped him." This last phrase she whispered, and then began weeping again at this exquisitely edged misfortune, sobbing, drawing her breath in gasps, wiping her eyes on the back of her wrist to avoid her smudged hand.

The simplicity of her grief filled Belshue with utter despair. All the fears and forebodings which had lain uneasily in the depths of his heart rose up and were realized. It seemed to Belshue that this sweet, sincere, untidy girl was at that moment withdrawn slowly from him, that she moved physically away from him never to return.

He faced about and went slowly out of the kitchen door, forgetting the bucket. He walked slowly and with a tottery effect of age into the great house and up a flight of curving stairs into a room he had set apart for his own. In it, over