She moved her head from side to side, slowly, in dissent, and got up and went to the window, where she gazed out over the house-tops at the paling afternoon. “No, I’m not his wife,” she said, in her quiet contralto. “Then why won’t you tell me how you got mixed up in this sort of thing?” “It’s all so silly and so commonplace,” she said, without turning to look at him. “Yes?” he said, and waited. She wheeled about and wrung out with a sudden passionate “Oh, what’s the good of all this! I am here tapping wires, and you are here doing the same. Neither of us belongs at this sort of work, but—but, we’re here!” “Can’t you tell me?” he asked, more gently, yet inwardly more dogged. “Yes, I _shall_ tell you,” she answered him, at last. “It began, really, six years ago when my mother died, in London, and my father went to pieces, went pitifully to pieces, and had to give up his profession as a barrister. I felt sorry for him, and stayed with him, through his months of drunkenness, and his gradual downfall. He started a little office for genealogical research—as we called it—digging up pretentious alliances, and suitable ancestors for idle and wealthy nobodies. This was bad enough, but little by little it degenerated into a sort of next-of-kin agency, and wrung its money from the poor, instead of the rich!” She paused for a moment, before she went on, gazing at the man before her in grim and terrible candor, steeled with the purpose to purge her soul of all she had to say, and have it over and done with.