But in fact I said nothing, and only kept along beside her. She looked at me mutely, and made a motion to me to turn back. When her father took our hands and stumblingly ran with us, I heartily wished that I had turned back. But nearly all the way he went peaceably enough. Long before we reached their home across the tracks, however, I heard the six o’clock whistles blow, and pictured the wrath of the mistress of the New Family when Mary Elizabeth had not returned in time to “help with the supper.” Very likely now they would not let her stay, and this new companionship of ours would have to end. Mary Elizabeth’s home was on the extreme edge of the town, and ordinarily I was not allowed to cross the tracks. Mary Elizabeth might even move away--that had happened to some of us, and the night had descended upon such as these and we had never heard of them again: Hattie Schenck, whom I had loved with unequalled devotion, where, for example, was she? Was it, then, to be the same with Mary Elizabeth? Her mother saw us coming. She hurried down to the gateway--the gate was detached and lying in the weeds within--and even then I was struck by the way of maternity with which she led her husband to the house. I remember her as large-featured, with the two bones of her arms sharply defined by a hollow running from wrist to elbow, and she constantly held her face as if the sun were shining in her eyes, but there was no sun shining there. And somehow, at the gate she had a way of receiving him, and of taking him with her. Hardly anything was said. The worst of it was that no one had to explain anything. Two of the little children ran away and hid. Someone dodged behind an open door. The man’s wife led him to the broken couch, and he lay down there like a little child. Standing in the doorway of that forlorn, disordered, ill-smelling room, I first dimly understood what I never have forgotten: That the man was not poor because he drank, as the village thought, but that he drank because he was poor. Instead of the horror at a drunken man which the village had laid it upon me to feel, I suddenly saw Mary Elizabeth’s father as her mother saw him when she folded her gingham apron and spread it across his shoulders and said: “Poor lad.” And when, in a few minutes, Mary Elizabeth and I were out on the street again, running silently, I remember feeling a great blind rage against the whole village and against the whole world that couldn’t seem to think what to do any more than Mary Elizabeth and I could think. The man of the New Family was watering the lawn, which meant that supper was done. We slipped in our back gate,--the New Family had none,--climbed the fence by my play-house, dropped down into the New Family’s garden, and entered their woodshed. In my own mind I had settled that I was of small account if I could not give the New Lady such a picture of what had happened that Mary Elizabeth should not lose her place, and I should not lose her.