sat down across from him and tried to mend a table-cloth, but I
could not sew. I kept seeing those two young things, each sick for
a sight of the other, and, from wishing they could have a minute
together, I got to planning it for them.

"Perhaps," I said finally, "if you want it very much--"

"Very much!"

"And if you will sit quiet, and stop tapping your fingers together
until you drive me crazy, I might contrive it for you. For five
minutes," I said. "Not a second longer."

He came right over and put his arms around me.

"Who are you, anyhow?" he said. "You who turn to the world the frozen
mask of a Union Street boarding-house landlady, who are a gentlewoman
by every instinct and training, and a girl at heart? Who are you?"

"I'll tell you what I am," I said. "I'm a romantic old fool, and you'd
better let me do this quickly, before I change my mind."

He freed me at that, but he followed to the telephone, and stood by
while I got Lida. He was in a perfect frenzy of anxiety, turning red
and white by turns, and in the middle of the conversation taking the
receiver bodily from me and holding it to his own ear.

She said she thought she could get away; she spoke guardedly, as if
Alma were near, but I gathered that she would come as soon as she
could, and, from the way her voice broke, I knew she was as excited as
the boy beside me.

She came, heavily coated and veiled, at a quarter after ten that
night, and I took her back to the dining-room, where he was waiting.
He did not make a move toward her, but stood there with his very lips
white, looking at her. And, at first, she did not make a move either,
but stood and gazed at him, thin and white, a wreck of himself. Then:

"Ell!" she cried, and ran around the table to him, as he held out his
arms.

The school-teacher was out. I went into the parlor bedroom and sat in
the cozy corner in the dark. I had done a wrong thing, and I was glad
of it. And sitting there in the darkness, I went over my own life
again. After all, it had been my own life; I had lived it; no one else
had shaped it for me. And if it was cheerless and colorless now, it
had had its big moments. Life is measured by big moments.

If I let the two children in the dining-room have fifteen big moments,
instead of five, who can blame me?

CHAPTER XIV

The next day was the sensational one of the trial. We went through
every phase of conviction: Jennie Brice was living. Jennie Brice was
de