at a definite
hour, and usually despatched in ten minutes or so. Few men there waste
time lounging over the table.

"I hardly knew you, Ralph--you have changed so much," she said, and I only
nodded, for I was impatient to hear her story; and she had surely changed
far more than I. The Minnie I used to know was characterized by a love of
mischief and childish vanity, but the present one wore rather the air of a
woman with some knowledge of life's tragedy.

"It's almost an old story now," she said bitterly. "Father had a craze for
religion, mother was always sighing, and there was no peace at home for
me. Then I met Tom Fletcher again--you remember him--and when he took me
to concerts and dances I felt at last that I had begun to live. The
endless drudgery in the mill, the little house in the smoky street, and
the weary chapel three times each Sunday, were crushing the life out of
me. You understand--you once told me you felt it all, and you went out in
search of fortune; but what can a woman do? Still, I dare not tell father.
All gaiety was an invention of the devil, according to him. We were
married before the registrar--Tom had reasons. I cannot tell you them; but
we were married," and she held up a thin finger adorned by a
wedding-ring.

I remembered Fletcher as a good-looking clerk with a taste for betting and
fanciful dress, who had been discharged from the Orb mill for inattention
to his duties, and I wondered that Minnie should have chosen him from
among her many other admirers of more sterling character.

"I said nothing to any one," she continued. "Tom was disappointed about
something on which he had counted. He'd got into trouble over his
accounts, too. There had been a scene with father, who said I was a child
of the devil, and when Tom told me there was false accusation against him,
and nobody must know we were going, we slipped away quietly. I was too
angered to write to father, and it might have put the police on Tom. Tom
was innocent, he said. We had very little money, work was hardly to be
had--and our child died soon after we settled in Winnipeg."

"Go on," I said gently, and she clenched her hands with a gesture that
expressed fierce resentment as well as sorrow as she added:

"The poor little innocent thing had no chance for its life--we were short
of even bare necessities, for Tom could pick up only a few dollars now and
then--and I think that all that was good in me died with it. So when he
fou