When Emma returned, her face was set and her cheeks flamed, so that their heat alone drew the tears to her eyes. Her hands shook, and hardly held the bit of soiled paper and the stumpy pencil that she carried. “Will you tell me your name and address?” she asked of the doctor. A sigh broke from her lips that tried not to be a groan. Black looked at her, and the colour flew from his face. He said afterward that his heart beat so that he thought some one knocked on the door. He knew what had happened. So did the doctor. “My accounts are payable in May,” he said, being kind, and knowing Soot City to be ignorant. Emma smiled again, and, with the patronizing manner that is the outcome of complete shyness, said, “Well, you’re a real good doctor.” And so, with a slight constriction of his kindly heart, he shook her hand and departed. But she caught Black at his exit. “That Quarry’s stole!” said she. Jerry looked sick and old; his voice sounded bitter. “I ain’t got a cent just now to spare,” he said. Then he grew fiercer, and cursed the Englishman exhaustively and with the awkwardness of a man unused to such conversational indulgence. The crowd followed as far as the funeral carriage and stood to watch it disappear in billows of dust. The white horses and the black barouche were alike buff before they were out of sight of The Tracks. And in sullen quiet Emma set herself to wait for Quarry, not trusting herself to look at Jarlsen lest the sight of him should soften her hate. “He took the whole wallet!” she repeated to herself, “and he was the only man August wouldn’t give to. He knew it, too, or he’d hev asked something off him when first he seen we was settin’ it up together.” VIII. QUARRY’S ATTEMPT AT EXPLANATION. “A man will say more to himself in excuse than he will to his God or his friend.” EMMA’S eyes roved from object to object as though she sought escape; they always returned to the door, whence she expected Quarry. It was a duty, she reasoned, to turn this man’s stealing to swift shame. Words flocked to her tongue that she could not remember having used before, and her mind’s eye saw the Englishman wince under them. A demon of invective filled her brain with fierce thoughts as she tore the shake-downs apart in a final hunt for the wallet. And then a fit of sobs and shaking beset her as she waited again in the kitchen for what she hoped would be in some sort vengeance. She remembered every mean and, in her characterizing adjective, every “useless” thing Quarry had done; how he had lied, and when. She remembered his drunkenness--that terrible drunkenness in which his self-assurance seemed boundless; the remembered vanity of his face startled her, and it seemed marvellous that his faults had not kept him from their household as they had kept him from their hearts.