"I thought," the dentist began, recalling her story, "I thought when you'd started in the schools--it was a mighty hard thing to do to get you in; it took all my pull on Mahoney." The woman's face flushed. "I know," she murmured. "They don't want married women. But if it hadn't been for Mahoney--" "Then," interrupted the dentist, "he'd been good enough to let you alone for most a year, and I thought you were out of your troubles." "I knew he would come back," she interposed quietly. "But now he comes back just as everything is nice, and worse, you come across him when he is nigh bein' shot to death. Then, worse yet, by what the papers said, you went to the hospital with him and gave the whole thing away. When I saw the name, Alves Preston, printed out, I swore." Mrs. Preston smiled at his vehemence. "Tell me, Alves," the old man asked in a rambling manner, "how did you ever come to marry him? I've wanted to ask you that from the first." Mrs. Preston rose from the chair and pulled her cloak about her. "I couldn't make you understand; I don't myself _now_." "D'yer love him?" the dentist persisted, not ungently. "Should I be here if I did?" she flashed resentfully. "I was a country girl away at school, more foolish than one of those dumb Swedes in my class, and he--" But she turned again to the window, with an impatient gesture. "It is something wrong in a woman," she murmured. "But she has no chance, no chance. I can't tell you now all the things." "Well," the dentist said soothingly, "let's see just how bad it is. Has your boss, the superintendent, or the principal spoke to you, turned you out? I see the reporter went around to the school, nosing after something." "They'd just transferred me--miles south," she answered indifferently. "I was glad of it. I don't have to meet the spying, talking teachers, and think all the time the pupils know it from their parents. They're all foreigners where I am now. They say the Everglade school is the next thing to the last. It's a kind of Purgatory, where they keep you for a few months before they dismiss you." "I didn't know any one was ever dismissed from a Chicago school," the dentist remarked. "Oh, sometimes when the superintendents or the supervisors don't want you. There is a supervisor in the Everglade district--" she stopped a moment, and then continued tranquilly--"he was very intimate at first. I thought he wanted to help me to get on in the school. But he wanted--other things. Perhaps when he doesn't--succeed--that will be the end." "It'll blow over," the dentist said encouragingly. "If the supervisor troubles you much, I'll see Mahoney. You've changed your boarding-place?" "Yes--but," she admitted in a moment, "they know it at the hospital." Dr. Leonard rubbed his bristly face irritably. "I've been to see him--it seemed I ought to--I was the only one who WOULD in the whole world--the only one to speak a word to him."