She was walking on when the girl caught her arm. "Perhaps you know my husband?" she persisted. "Do you?" Once more Rachel stood still. "Yes I know him--slightly." "I knew you did," and a note of incipient jealousy sounded in the other's voice. "When did you know him?" she asked, and she fixed sharp eyes on Rachel's face. "It was last summer in Maine," Rachel answered. "I took him out a few times in a boat to make some experiments. When I saw the name I recognized it." Her indifference, the sudden cold and remote expression of her eye, which was like a thrust of the arm, deceived her questioner. "Oh, I see," she said, meekly. "Was it the _depth indicator_! Oh I know it was," and at the mention of this instrument, she returned to her original grievance. "It's that _depth indicator_ that's been at the bottom of all our troubles," she explained; "if it hadn't been for that, Alexander would have finished the lithographing press and then everything would have come out different. But now Father--Oh, I can talk to you, can't I?" she interpolated. "I must talk to someone. I've been treated so--you don't know!" and she began to sob again in a helpless, childish fashion, with the unrestrained grief of a nature, hysterical, feverish. But one thought burned in Rachel: Emil's marriage. Her pain, however, was not new; she felt that she had lived through it before, for it is a characteristic of suffering that it never comes as a novel experience and herein it differs from joy. The disconnected explanations of her companion, mingled with the repeated request to be allowed to confide in her, gradually roused Rachel. Her eyes travelled over Annie. She noticed the once tasteful dress, which was now badly worn, the little pear-shaped face with its peaked nose and babyish eyes. She was about to reply haughtily, then, moved by Annie's beseeching look, altered her intention. "Yes, you can tell me if you want to," she answered softly and dully. Involuntarily the two girls turned their steps in the direction of a square, a triangular breathing place in this densely populated section. They seated themselves on one of the benches and Annie poured out her story. But her words scarcely penetrated Rachel's brain. She stared at some clothing drying on a fire-escape, and it struck her that the antics of the clothing fastened to a line were no more grotesque and absurd than the antics of human creatures fastened to life. Inwardly she rocked on the wide sea of misery. The dramatic features of her situation were not lost on Emil's wife. As she described her life in her parent's home, contrasting it with her present mode of existence, it was clear that Annie viewed herself in a romantic light. Never the less her misery was real, and more than once she had recourse to her small damp handkerchief.