“But I stayed with father, through it all. I told myself I could live it down, the squalor, and the meanness, and the deceits, and even the drunkenness—I stayed with him because I pitied him. Even then he was a brilliant man. And I would have worked and fought for him to the end, only, at last, he wanted me to pose as a claimant for an estate then in chancery. _That_ I would not and could not do. I went to Reading, and became an invalid’s companion. Then, after father’s death—after his horrible death—his older brother, at Oxford, offered to give me a home. He was an old man, a curate with five daughters, and I felt, then, that it would be unjust. So I answered an advertisement in a London paper, and came to America to be a governess in a New York family, in the house of a diamond importer named Ottenheimer. At the end of my first week there my mistress unjustly suspected me of—Oh, I can’t explain it all to you here, but she was a vulgar and unscrupulous woman, and said I was too good-looking to be a governess, and discharged me without even a reference. I was penniless in two weeks, and would gladly have crept back to my uncle in Oxford, if I had been able. Then, when I was almost starving, I was glad enough to become the secretary of an investment company, with an office in Wall Street. They had trouble with the Post-Office department in Washington, and then the police raided the office, for it turned out to be nothing more than a swindling scheme. . . . And then, oh, I don’t know, I seemed to drift from one thing to another, until I was the English heiress in a matrimonial bureau, and a French baroness in some foreign litigation scheme. But all the time I was only waiting to get enough money to creep back to Oxford. I kept telling myself that in a few weeks more I should be able to escape. I kept dreaming of it, until Oxford seemed to grow into a sort of sanctuary. But things went on and on, and still I waited.” “And then what?” demanded Durkin, startled at the rising note of self-hate in her feverish declamation. “Then, at last, I thought I had escaped into honesty, even in America. But it was the same as before. I met MacNutt!” “And then what?” Durkin’s customarily careless shoulders were very upright. “Oh, first it was a woman’s get-rich-quick concern in Chicago; then a turf-investment office in St. Louis; then a matrimonial bureau of our own, until the police put a stop to it because of the post-office people; then it was chasing the circuit for a season; and, finally, this wire-tapping scheme!” She looked at him, weary-eyed, hiding nothing, smiling hopelessly.