“Anywhere, where there’s daylight and honesty and fair play!” “There’s MacNutt!” she cried, remembering, opening her drooping eyes to grim life again. “He’d—he’d—” She did not finish. “What’s he to us?” Durkin demanded. “He hasn’t bought our _souls_!” “No, but we have to live—we have to work and pay as we go. And he could stop everything!” “Let him interfere,” cried the other, fiercely. “I’ve never been afraid of him! I’m as good a fighter as he is, by heaven! Just _let_ him interfere, and he’ll find his filthy money isn’t everything!” The woman at his side was silent. “I only wish I had a few of his thousands,” added Durkin, more humbly. She looked up quickly, with the flash of some new thought shadowed on her white face. “Why _shouldn’t_ we?” she cried, half bitterly. “We have gone through enough for him!” “And it’s all rottenness, anyway,” assuaged Durkin. “The Postal-Union directors themselves, who feed MacNutt and all his fry,—they make over four million a year out of their pool-room service! And one of them is a pillar of that church we passed, just above the Waldorf!” “No, it’s not that,” she hesitated. She had long since grown afraid of that ancient sophistry. “But why shouldn’t we?” he persisted. “Then we might go away somewhere,” she was saying dreamily, “away to England, even! I wonder if you would like England? It always seems so much of yesterday there, to me. It’s always tomorrow over here. But at home everything doesn’t seem to live in the future, as we do now. I wonder if you would like England?” “I’d like any place, where you were!” “_He’s_ always been a welcher with the people he uses. He will be a welcher with you—yes, and with me, some day, I suppose.” She turned to Durkin with a sudden determination. “Would you risk it, with me?” “I’d risk anything for you!” he said, taking her hand once more. “We have a right to our happiness,” she argued, passionately. “We have our life, all our life, almost—before us! And I’ve loved you, Jim,” she confessed, her gloved fingers toying with a button on his sleeve, “from the first day MacNutt brought you up!” Then a silence fell over her, and he could see the reflection of some strange conflict going on in her mind. Although he could perceive the unhappiness it brought to her, he could in no wise surmise the source of it, so that when she spoke again, the suddenness of her cry almost startled him. “Oh, why didn’t I know you and love you when I was a young and heart-free girl, singing and laughing about my quiet home? Why couldn’t love have come to me then, when all my heart and life were as white as the plain little cambric gown I wore—when I was worthy of it, and could have received it openly, and been glad of it!” He could not follow her, but, lover-like, he tried to kiss away her vague fears and scruples. In this effort, though, he found her lips so cold and lifeless, that he drew away from her, and looked at her in wonder.