m.
Was in love with him.

"Does he know how things are?" he asked.

She nodded. "Yes."

"Does he offer to do anything?"

"Him? He does not. And don't you go to him and try to get him to marry
me. I tell you I'd die first."

He left them there, sitting in the half light, and going out into the
hall picked up his hat. Mrs. Boyd heard him and called to him, and
before he went out he ran upstairs to her room. It seemed to him, as he
bent over her, that her lips were bluer than ever, her breath a little
shallower and more difficult. Her untouched supper tray was beside her.

"I wasn't hungry," she explained. "Seems to me, Willy, if you'd let
me go downstairs so I could get some of my own cooking I'd eat better.
Ellen's all right, but I kind o' crave sweet stuff, and she don't like
making desserts."

"You'll be down before long," he assured her. "And making me pies.
Remember those pies you used to bake?"

"You always were a great one for my pies," she said, complacently.

He kissed her when he left. He had always marveled at the strange lack
of demonstrativeness in the household, and he knew that she valued his
small tendernesses.

"Now remember," he said, "light out at ten o'clock, and no going
downstairs in the middle of the night because you smell smoke. When you
do, it's my pipe."

"I don't think you hardly ever go to bed, Willy."

"Me? Get too much sleep. I'm getting fat with it."

The stale little joke was never stale with her. He left her smiling, and
went down the stairs and out into the street.

He had no plan in his mind except to see Louis Akers, and to find out
from him if he could what truth there was in Edith Boyd's accusation.
He believed Edith, but he must have absolute certainty before he did
anything. Girls in trouble sometimes shielded men. If he could get the
facts from Louis Akers--but he had no idea of what he would do then. He
couldn't very well tell Lily, but her people might do something. Or Mrs.
Doyle.

He knew Lily well enough to know that she would far rather die than
marry Akers, under the circumstances. That her failure to marry Louis
Akers would mean anything as to his own relationship with her he never
even considered. All that had been settled long ago, when she said she
did not love him.

At the Benedict he found that his man had not come home, and for an hour
or two he walked the streets. The city seemed less majestic to him than
usual; its quiet by-streets were lined w