They stopped while the horse nibbled at a tall weed in the roadway. They had got fairly into the prairie, and now at some distance on left and right gawky Queen Anne houses appeared. But along their path the waste was unbroken. The swamp on either side of the road was filled with birds, who flew in and out and perched on the dry planks in the walks. An abandoned electric-car track, raised aloft on a high embankment, crossed the avenue. Here and there a useless hydrant thrust its head far above the muddy soil, sometimes out of the swamp itself. They had left the lake behind them, but the freshening evening breeze brought its damp breath across their faces. "How came you to get into this spot?" the doctor asked, after his searching eyes had roamed over the misty landscape, half swamp, half city suburb. "I was transferred--about the time of the operation. My school is over there," she pointed vaguely toward the southwest. "I could not afford to live any distance from the school," she added bluntly. "Besides, I wanted to be alone." So she taught, Sommers reflected, yet she had none of the professional air, the faded niceness of face and manner which he associated with the city school-teacher. "I haven't taught long," she volunteered, "only about a year. First I was over by Lincoln Park, near where I had been living." "Do you like the teaching?" Sommers asked. "I hate it," she remarked calmly, without any show of passion. "It takes a little of one's life every day, and leaves you a little more dead." They walked in silence for a few minutes, and then Mrs. Preston suddenly stopped. "Why do you come?" she exclaimed. "Why do you want to know? It can do no good,--I know it can do no good, and it is worse to have any one--_you_--know the hateful thing. I want to crush it in myself, never to tell, no,--no one," she stopped incoherently. "I shall go," the doctor replied calmly, compassionately. "And it is best to tell." Her rebellious face came back to its wonted repose. "Yes, I suppose I make it worse. It is best to tell--sometime." CHAPTER VII As they proceeded, more briskly now, she talked of her life in the Chicago schools. She had taken the work when nothing else offered in the day of her calamity. She described the struggle for appointment. If it had not been for her father's old friend, a dentist, she would never have succeeded in entering the system. A woman, she explained, must be a Roman Catholic, or have some influence with the Board, to get an appointment. Qualifications? She had had a better education in the Rockminster school than was required, but if a good-natured schoolteacher hadn't coached her on special points in pedagogy, school management, nature-study, etc., she would never have passed the necessary examinations.