tion he saw in his delay to meet her only cowardice and
harsh indifference. And yet all along he had acted on the conclusion
that he had no right to ask a woman to go into the danger of his work
with him.

Pacing up and down his narrow room, he began lashing himself again,
excusing, forgiving Myra everything. He had never really understood her
nature; he should have gone to her in the beginning and trusted to her
love and her insight; he should have let her share the aftermath of the
fire; that fierce experience would have taught her that he was forever
mortgaged to a life of noble reparation, and even the terror of it all
would have been better than shutting her out, to brood morbidly alone.

Yet, what could he do? He must be strong, be wise, keep his head. He had
pledged himself, sworn himself into the service of the working class
movement. There was no escape. He tried to bury himself in his books,
regain for a moment his splendid dream of the future state, feel again
those strange throes of world-building, of social service.

And out of it all grew a letter, a letter to Myra. He wrote it in a
strange haste, the sentences coming too rapidly for his pen. It ran:

DEAR MYRA,--I must _make_ you understand! I hurt
you when I wanted to help you; I wronged you when
I wanted only to do right by you. Why didn't you
listen to me this morning?

It was at the fire there, at that moment you tugged
at my sleeve and I spoke to you, that I saw clearly that
my life was no longer my own, that I could not even
give it to you, whom I loved, whom I love now with
every bit of my existence. I told you I belonged to
those dead girls. Have you forgotten? _Sixty of them_--and
three of my men. It was as if I had killed them
myself. I am a guilty man, and I must expiate this
guilt. There is no use fooling myself with pleasant
phrases, no use thinking others to blame. It was I
who was responsible.

And through the death of those girls I learned of the
misery of the world, of the millions in want, the women
wrenched from their homes to toil in the mills, the
little children--fresh, sweet bodies, bubbling hearts,
and tender, whimsical minds--slaving in factories,
tiny boys and girls laboring like men and women in
cotton and knitting mills, in glass factory and coal-mine,
and on the streets of cities, upon whose frail little
spirits is thrust the responsibility, the wage burden, the
mone