a," cried Kurt, "are you going to market this day? It is
the coldest day this winter!"

"Oh, I don't mind," replied Thekla, nervously. Then she had wrapped a
scarf about her and gone out while he was getting into his own coat, and
conning a proffer to go in her stead.

"Oh, well, Thekla she aint such a fool like she looks!" he observed to
the cat, "say, pussy, WAS it you out yestiddy?"

The cat only blinked her yellow eyes and purred. She knew that she had
not been out, last night. Not any better than her mistress, however, who
at this moment was hailing a street-car.

The street-car did not land her anywhere near a market; it whirled her
past the lines of low wooden houses into the big brick shops with their
arched windows and terra-cotta ornaments that showed the ambitious
architecture of a growing Western town, past these into mills and
factories and smoke-stained chimneys. Here, she stopped. An acquaintance
would hardly have recognized her, her ruddy cheeks had grown so pale.
But she trotted on to the great building on the corner from whence came
a low, incessant buzz. She went into the first door and ran against Carl
Olsen. "Carl, I got to see Mr. Lossing," said she breathlessly.

"There ain't noding----"

"No, Gott sei dank', but I got to see him."

It was not Carl's way to ask questions; he promptly showed her the
office and she entered. She had not seen young Harry Lossing half a
dozen times; and, now, her anxious eyes wandered from one dapper figure
at the high desks, to another, until Lossing advanced to her.

He was a handsome young man, she thought, and he had kind eyes, but they
hardened at her first timid sentence: "I am Mrs. Lieders, I come about
my man----"

"Will you walk in here, Mrs. Lieders?" said Lossing. His voice was like
the ice on the window-panes.

She followed him into a little room. He shut the door.

Declining the chair that he pushed toward her she stood in the centre of
the room, looking at him with the pleading eyes of a child.

"Mr. Lossing, will you please save my Kurt from killing himself?"

"What do you mean?" Lossing's voice had not thawed.

"It is for you that he will kill himself, Mr. Lossing. This is the dird
time he has done it. It is because he is so lonesome now, your father is
died and he thinks that you forget, and he has worked so hard for you,
but he thinks that you forget. He was never tell me till yesterday; and
then--it was--it was because I would not let