"If I can once get her respectably married," said Irene, nippingly, her small face resolute, "I won't worry about what she tells or doesn't tell. It's been hard enough on _me_, I can tell you!" She went briskly upstairs and they heard her firm closing of the door. "You see?" the matron wanted to know. "I'm fearing we've lost the fight," said Michael Daragh. Jane insisted on hope. "Perhaps she did tell him, and everything's all right, but she had no chance to see Irene and explain! Surely you won't let her take Billiken until we are sure?" Then the front door opened quietly and Ethel came in to stand before them, her tragic and accusing eyes on Jane. "You made me tell," she said. "_You_ made me!" And when Jane ran to her, questioning, eager, she pushed her away. "It's you! It's you did it!" Michael Daragh strode to her and put a steadying arm about her shoulders. "Child, tell us the way of it." Her teeth were chattering and her face seemed to grow whiter and whiter. "I told him. I told him everything. I kept saying to myself over and over, all the way to the store, just what she told me"--she flung a bruised and bitter look at Jane--"'I must love him more than I want him'--and I went straight up to him at his counter, right there in the daytime. He was selling a necktie to a fat old man with a red neck. It was a dark blue tie with light blue spots on it." She added the detail carefully in her spent little voice. "I waited until he was gone and then I told Jerry. He just looked at me and _looked_ at me, and made me say it again, and then--then he just walked away without looking back. I had to go to work, but I watched and watched, and _watched_. He never came back to his counter. Pretty soon I just got crazy. I went over and asked. They said he was sick, and gone home." She sagged in Michael Daragh's hands and he lifted her and carried her into the matron's room, the matron hurrying beside him. Then Jane Vail sat alone in the ugly office, contemplating the result of her eloquence. She could hear Ethel's sobbing and the matron's sharp treble, and the steady and rhythmic flow of the Irishman's voice. She rose to follow them, but the closed door halted her. They had wanted her to do this thing, to do the thing they had failed to do, and she had done it; and now they shut her away while they strove to heal where she had hurt. Why had she done it? Why had she come at all? Why had she mixed and muddled in this sordid tangle which was none of her bright business? And why--chief of all whys--had she rashly and sentimentally offered to give up her holidays at home for the futile endeavor to make Christmas merry for these miserable girls?