Joan was worried. “I told Dad I should only ask him for enough to make up two hundred a year,” she explained. “He’ll laugh at me for not knowing my own mind.” “What’s he like in himself?” he asked her. “You’ve been seeing something of him, haven’t you?”!

Her bright eyes had caught sight of the ring upon Joan’s hand. She touched it with her little fragile fingers. “A tragedy,” Miss Tolley corrected him. “There are millions of such tragedies being enacted around us at this moment. Sensitive women compelled to suffer the embraces of men that they have come to loathe. What’s to be done?”

“I had to see our solicitor one morning,” he explained, “when I was secretary to a miners’ union up north. A point had arisen concerning the legality of certain payments. It was a matter of vast importance to us; but he didn’t seem to be taking any interest, and suddenly he jumped up. ‘I’m sorry, Phillips,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got a big trouble of my own on at home—I guess you know what—and I don’t seem to care a damn about yours. You’d better see Delauny, if you’re in a hurry.’ And I did.” The landlady entered unexpectedly with the tea; but he did not rise till Joan turned away, nor did he seem disconcerted. Neither did the landlady. She was an elderly, quiet-eyed woman, and had served more than one generation of young people with their teas. “Oh, a little,” she answered. “He’s absolutely sincere; and he means business. He won’t stop at the bottom of the ladder now he’s once got his foot upon it.”