only, at last, he wanted me to pose as a claimant for an estate then in chancery. That I would not and could not do. I went to Reading, and became an invalid’s companion. Then, after father’s death—after his horrible death—his older brother, at Oxford, offered to give me a home. He was an old man, a curate with five daughters, and I felt, then, that it would be unjust. So I answered an advertisement in a London paper, and came to America to be a governess in a New York family, in the house of a diamond importer named Ottenheimer. At the end of my first week there my mistress unjustly suspected me of—Oh, I can’t explain it all to you here, but she was a vulgar and unscrupulous woman, and said I was too good-looking to be a governess, and discharged me without even a reference. I was penniless in two weeks, and would gladly have crept back to my uncle in Oxford, if I had been able. Then, when I was almost starving, I was glad enough to become the secretary of an investment company, with an office in Wall Street. They had trouble with the Post-Office department in Washington, and then the police raided the office, for it turned out to be nothing more than a swindling scheme. . . . And then, oh, I don’t know, I seemed to drift from one thing to another, until I was the English heiress in a matrimonial bureau, and a French baroness in some foreign litigation scheme. But all the time I was only waiting to get enough money to creep back to Oxford. I kept telling myself that in a few weeks more I should be able to escape. I kept dreaming of it, until Oxford seemed to grow into a sort of sanctuary. But things went on and on, and still I waited.”

“And then what?” demanded Durkin, startled at the rising note of self-hate in her feverish declamation.

“Then, at last, I thought I had escaped into honesty, even in America. But it was the same as before. I met MacNutt!”

“And then what?” Durkin’s customarily careless shoulders were very upright.

“Oh, first it was a woman’s get-rich-quick concern in Chicago; then a turf-investment office in St. Louis; then a matrimonial bureau of our own, until the police put a stop to it because of the post-office people; then it was chasing the circuit for a season; and, finally, this wire-tapping scheme!”

She looked at him, weary-eyed, hiding nothing, smiling hopelessly.

“They write to me, from time to time,” she went on, more quietly, but none the less tragically. “My uncle’s parish is just outside Oxford, a quiet little high-walled place full of flowers and birds. But he is getting very old, and there are six of them, five girls, and Albert, the youngest. Some day I shall go back and live with them—only, in some way, I grow more and more afraid to face them. So I search for excuses to send them money and gifts. They think I’m still a governess here, and I write lying letters to them, and tell them things out of my own head, things quite false and untrue! So, you see, I’ve been nothing but cowardly—and—and wicked, from the first!”

“And is that all?” demanded Durkin, not trusting himself to show one jot of feeling.

“Yes,” she answered, drearily; “I think that is all.”

“But you’re—you’re too good for all this!” he cried impetuously, indignantly. “Why don’t you break away from it, at once?”

“I’m going to,—some day! I’ve always waited, though, and everything has dragged on and on and on, and I’ve been half afraid of MacNutt—he’s the type of man, you know, who never forgives a person—and half-afraid of myself. But, some day—”

“Oh, I know what it’s like,” cried Durkin, drawn toward her, strangely nearer to her, in some intangible way. She read the sudden look on his face, and blushed under it, almost girlishly, once more.

“I want to rest, and be quiet, and live decently, away from the world, somewhere,” she said dreamily, as though speaking only to herself.

Durkin walked to the window where she stood, checked himself, strode back to the relay on the work-table, and looked at the huddled instruments, absently.

“So do I,” he said, earnestly, with his heels well apart.

“Do you?” she asked. He went over to where she stood.

“Yes, and I mean to,” he declared, determinedly, turning with her to look at the gathering twilight of the city, and then lapsing into awkward silence once more.