And yet, when she had finished a supper alone and had dropped wearily into a chair by the lamp, she found she was almost ready for a world-change herself. She was too tired to care to read, too tired for coherent thought. In her head buzzed and hummed and roared the machines of the shop and every now and then her whole body twitched convulsively. Outside the rain beat steadily upon the pavement. It was a night like this, she remembered, that she had been carried, a little new-born baby, and placed on mammy's big bed. Who did such a thing? Not her young mother who had died so soon after her birth. Not her grandfather who in the end had given her his name. Was it her mother's mother who had tried to hide the family shame? She shrewdly suspected so. Well, she had not succeeded, for here was Hertha Ogilvie, after all. It was not so easy to hide a white child, not so easy to stifle the spirit of remorse. As she sat in her chair, her eyes half closed, she found her thoughts, as so often happened, drifting back to her home among the pines, to the cabin with the white sand at the doorway and the red roses clambering over the porch. Instead of coming home to this empty flat, Ellen and her mother and Tom were on hand to welcome her. They helped take off her things, they dried her shoes, they gave her hot coffee to drink. Was it foolish to have gone away to enter the life of this ruthless city that held you in a mad whirl of work for half the year and for the other half left you to starve; this city in which there was no time for a pleasant homecoming and an evening meal together; this city in which you met a friendly face and lost it again in the great crowds that swarmed in millions over the miles of narrow streets? Her head drooped as though nodding yes to her questions, and her eyes wholly closed. But just then the doorbell rang. CHAPTER XX It was the bell of the outer door, and Hertha went to the kitchen to push the button that released the latch. Who could be coming to see Kathleen, she thought, on such a wretched night? Of course, some one who needed her services as nurse; and, going into the hall, she opened the outer door of the flat the better to guide the stranger upstairs. "May I come in?" It was a very wet figure that stood before her clasping a hat in one hand and in the other a large cotton umbrella that dripped puddles of water upon the floor. The question was asked in a jovial tone, and yet the man's attitude betrayed something like timidity. "Certainly," Hertha answered. "Give me your umbrella; it's very wet." "No, tell me where to put it; you mustn't get any of this rain on you," and Richard Shelby Brown followed Hertha as she led the way into the kitchen. Together they put the umbrella into the washtub where it could drip harmlessly, and then, divested of his coat and hat, the young man went with his hostess into the front room where she insisted that he sit close to the radiator to get dry.