e seemed inevitable, but I did not know the woman or the really
wonderful grip she held on herself. Seeing that he was moved by nothing
she had said, she suddenly paused, and presently I heard her observe in
quite a different tone:

"There is one thing you must know--which I thought you would know
without my telling you. I have never lived with this man, and I believed
him dead when I gave my hand to you."

The mayor's fingers twitched. She had touched him at last. "Speak! tell
me," he murmured hoarsely. "I do not want to do you any injustice."

"I shall have to begin far, far back; tell about my early life and all
its temptations," she faltered, "or you will never understand."

"Speak."

Sensible at this point of the extreme impropriety of my presence,
I rose, with an apology, to leave. But she shook her head quickly,
determinedly, saying that as I had heard so much I must hear more. Then
she went on with her story.

"I have committed a great fault," said she, "but one not so deep or
inexcusable as now appears, whatever that man may say," she added with a
slow turn toward the silent secretary.

Did she expect to provoke a reply from the man who, after the first
triumphant assertion of his claim, had held himself as removed from
her and as unresponsive to her anguish as had he whom she directly
addressed? If so, she must have found her disappointment bitter, for he
did not respond with so much as a look. He may have smiled, but if
so, it was not a helpful smile; for she turned away with a shudder and
henceforth faced and addressed the mayor only.

"My mother married against the wishes of all her family and they never
forgave her. My father died early--he had never got on in the world--and
before I was fifteen I became the sole support of my invalid mother as
well as of myself. We lived in Boone, Minnesota.

"You can imagine what sort of support it was, as I had no special
talent, no training and only the opportunity given by a crude western
town of two or three hundred inhabitants. I washed dishes in the hotel
kitchen--I who had a millionaire uncle in Detroit and had been fed on
tales of wealth and culture by a mother who remembered her own youth
and was too ignorant of my real nature to see the harm she was doing.
I washed dishes and ate my own heart out in shame and longing--bitter
shame and frenzied longing, which you must rate at their full force if
you would know my story and how I became linked to this m