They transferred to another line to complete the journey to Jean’s boarding house. Wayne had expected to leave her at the door. He was surprised when she asked him in. “I would like to see you a moment, Mr. Craighill, if you can wait.” She turned up the gas in a dingy parlour whose shabby upholstery retained the vague conglomerate odours of boiled vegetables. The place was hot and he threw open his coat but she did not ask him to sit down. She closed the door and stood beside it, as though to emphasize the brevity of the interview. “I must tell you something--something you have a right to know. I ought to have told you at your house the other morning, but I could not do it then. It pleased me--I may as well tell you that; it can make no difference now--I was pleased that you wanted my friendship, that you asked me to help you. It flattered me, I suppose, but I knew at once that it was all wrong. I had known from the first time you spoke to me and even after we met again at the parish house, that we must not know each other. It was all wrong, very wrong. And to-day you heard what Joe said. He was delirious and didn’t even know who we were; but what he said about me had a meaning. We were born in the same town--up there at Denbeigh. His father and mine both worked in the anthracite mines; we went to school together; I went to the high school, but Joe had to stop and go to work. When I was eighteen we ran off and were married by a minister in Scranton. I think he really loved me and I was fond of him, but I had been better educated than Joe. He was a miner, but had quit that to play baseball. He was a good player, they said, and could make more money travelling about than by working in the mines. But it was a mistake, our marrying, and I saw at once that it wouldn’t do. After three months I wrote to him while he was away that I would not live with him--that it was all ended. My grandfather got a divorce for me--I know now that was wrong, too. Joe did nothing to prevent it; but after I came to Pittsburg last fall I began meeting him, and he would follow me sometimes. He had taken it hard, poor Joe! And I was anxious to go on with my studies--that was the real trouble; and Joe didn’t know or care about those things. He used to laugh at my pictures and say they were very pretty; but he was never unkind to me. He was a good boy--a clean, upright boy; and I brushed him out of my life as you would sweep dust out of a room. It was not right--it was not right--it was not right!” She stood rigidly against the wall, her plain, long coat thrown open and disclosing her simplest and cheapest of gowns. When she had spoken to him in his father’s library of the nobility of labour it had been with an exultance that thrilled him; she had told him this pitiful little story in hurried whispers, dry-eyed but with uplifted head.