Philip nodded. “I have seen it all along. I don’t know what Madame Marchande is paying Jean, but it stands to reason it isn’t enough to keep a family of four properly alive.” “You can bet your bottom dollar it isn’t. I’ve been with them enough to note the little pinchings and scrimpings and they make my heart bleed. It is up to us, one or the other of us, to climb into the breach, and I have found the way to do it. There is a spare bed-room in the cottage, and last evening I asked Mrs. Dabney if she would be willing to take a lodger. She was so willing that she cried.” “Well?” said Philip. “As I say, it’s up to us--or one of us; the room isn’t big enough for two.” “Go over there and live with them, you mean?” “That’s it. And since they were your friends before they were mine, you shall have the first chance at it. But if you don’t go, I shall. They need the money. Think it over, and we’ll thresh it out after I come back.” For some time after Bromley had gone, Philip sat in his reading chair thrilling to his finger-tips. To live under the same roof with Jean; to be with her daily in the close intimacies of the home life; to be able to help her legitimately in the carrying of her heavy burden until the time should come when, his own filial duty discharged and the Trask name cleared, he might persuade her to shift the burden to his shoulders--to his and not to Harry Bromley’s.... There was only one fly in this precious pot of ointment: that saying of Jean’s scarcely an hour old: “I suppose I am like other women. When the time comes--if it ever does come--that I think enough of a man to marry him, I shan’t ask what he has been; only what he is and means to be.” Was she trying to tell him that Bromley was the man? It was in that hour that the virtuous ego rose to its most self-satisfied height. Jean, wise in the hard school of adversity but innocent as a child in matters touching her soul’s welfare, should be made to see that she must not risk her future happiness by marrying any man who, however lovable, had once shown the weak thread in the fabric of his character and might show it again. It should be his task to make her see it; to convince her that her duty to herself and to her unborn children lay in quite a different direction. In the levitating exhilaration of this thought the room suddenly became too close and confining to contain him, and he put on his coat and hat and descended to the street. Conscious only of an urge to keep moving, he began to walk aimlessly, through Curtis to Sixteenth Street, past the new opera house now nearing completion, and so on down toward Larimer.