ad kept them with instinctive tact.

"I said everything--yes," he replied. "But if you would like to know--"

"Perhaps I had better tell you something first. I had just parted
with him--it couldn't have been more than half an hour--in front of
Brentano's; he must have gone straight to his death. We were talking,
and I--I said, Why didn't some one go among the strikers and plead with
them to be peaceable, and keep them from attacking the new men. I knew
that he felt as I did about the strikers: that he was their friend. Did
you see--do you know anything that makes you think he had been trying to
do that?"

"I am sorry," March began, "I didn't see him at all till--till I saw him
lying dead."

"My husband was there purely by accident," Mrs. March put in. "I had
begged and entreated him not to go near the striking anywhere. And he
had just got out of the car, and saw the policeman strike that wretched
Lindau--he's been such an anxiety to me ever since we have had anything
to do with him here; my husband knew him when he was a boy in the West.
Mr. March came home from it all perfectly prostrated; it made us all
sick! Nothing so horrible ever came into our lives before. I assure you
it was the most shocking experience."

Miss Vance listened to her with that look of patience which those who
have seen much of the real suffering of the world--the daily portion of
the poor--have for the nervous woes of comfortable people. March hung
his head; he knew it would be useless to protest that his share of the
calamity was, by comparison, infinitesimally small.

After she had heard Mrs. March to the end even of her repetitions, Miss
Vance said, as if it were a mere matter of course that she should have
looked the affair up, "Yes, I have seen Mr. Lindau at the hospital--"

"My husband goes every day to see him," Mrs. March interrupted, to give.
a final touch to the conception of March's magnanimity throughout.

"The poor man seems to have been in the wrong at the time," said Miss
Vance.

"I could almost say he had earned the right to be wrong. He's a man of
the most generous instincts, and a high ideal of justice, of equity--too
high to be considered by a policeman with a club in his hand," said
March, with a bold defiance of his wife's different opinion of Lindau.
"It's the policeman's business, I suppose, to club the ideal when he
finds it inciting a riot."

"Oh, I don't blame Mr. Lindau; I don't blame the policeman; he was a