, but I didn't like to ask you until you were ready to
say.... Now we'll straighten this thing out."

Her robust, confident manner cheered Milly as much as her embrace. She
trusted Ernestine's strength as she had once that of her husband.
Ernestine went at things like a man in more ways than one. Releasing
Milly, she stood over her frowningly, her hands on her hips, and looked
steadily, intently at the pitiful face of the other woman.

"Couldn't I do something in the laundry?" Milly suggested timidly. "You
employ so many women there," she faltered. It had taken a struggle with
her pride to contemplate this work. "I'm pretty strong."

Ernestine smiled and shook her head very positively.

"No, that's one thing that _wouldn't_ do. You'd be no good as a
working-woman now, dearie!"

"But I _must_ do something!" Milly wailed, "or starve and let Virgie go
to her father's people. Isn't there _anything_ I can do in the world?"

She had reached the ultimate bottom of life, she felt, and her demand
had a tragic pathos in it. She waited for her answer.

"Yes!" Ernestine exclaimed, a smile of successful thinking on her broad
face. "You can make a home for me--a real one--that's what you can
do--fine! Now listen," she insisted, as she saw the look of
disappointment on Milly's expectant face. "Listen to me--it ain't bad at
all."

And she unfolded her plan, recounting again her longing for her own
hearth, and proving to Milly that she could do a real, useful thing in
the world, if she would make life pleasanter and happier for one who was
able to earn money for three.

"Don't wait for your friends to come back," she urged. "Just pack right
up as soon as you can and move downstairs. Do you suppose Virgie's
asleep? We'll tell her to-morrer any way.... And you do with my shack
what you want,--any old thing, so's you let me sleep there. It'll be
fine, fine!"

And so it was agreed, although Milly was not greatly pleased with the
prospect of becoming homemaker and companion to the Laundryman. It was
not very different in essentials from her marriage with Jack, and she
recognized now that she had not made a success of that on the economic
side. In short, it was like so much else in her life, practically all
her life, she felt bitterly,--it was a shift, a compromise, a
_pis-aller_, and this time it was a social descent also. What would her
friends say? But Milly courageously put that cheap thought out of her
mind. If this was all t