"I want you to take back what you've
said, or else make it good. One or the other you must do before I quit
this room. Put yourself in my place. Here am I, a stranger in the town.
I belong to a society that I know only as an innocent one. You'll
find it through the length and breadth of the States, but always as an
innocent one. Now, when I am counting upon joining it here, you tell me
that it is the same as a murder society called the Scowrers. I guess you
owe me either an apology or else an explanation, Mr. Shafter."

"I can but tell you vat the whole vorld knows, mister. The bosses of the
one are the bosses of the other. If you offend the one, it is the other
vat vill strike you. We have proved it too often."

"That's just gossip--I want proof!" said McMurdo.

"If you live here long you vill get your proof. But I forget that you
are yourself one of them. You vill soon be as bad as the rest. But you
vill find other lodgings, mister. I cannot have you here. Is it not bad
enough that one of these people come courting my Ettie, and that I dare
not turn him down, but that I should have another for my boarder? Yes,
indeed, you shall not sleep here after to-night!"

McMurdo found himself under sentence of banishment both from his
comfortable quarters and from the girl whom he loved. He found her alone
in the sitting-room that same evening, and he poured his troubles into
her ear.

"Sure, your father is after giving me notice," he said. "It's little I
would care if it was just my room, but indeed, Ettie, though it's only
a week that I've known you, you are the very breath of life to me, and I
can't live without you!"

"Oh, hush, Mr. McMurdo, don't speak so!" said the girl. "I have told
you, have I not, that you are too late? There is another, and if I have
not promised to marry him at once, at least I can promise no one else."

"Suppose I had been first, Ettie, would I have had a chance?"

The girl sank her face into her hands. "I wish to heaven that you had
been first!" she sobbed.

McMurdo was down on his knees before her in an instant. "For God's sake,
Ettie, let it stand at that!" he cried. "Will you ruin your life and
my own for the sake of this promise? Follow your heart, acushla! 'Tis a
safer guide than any promise before you knew what it was that you were
saying."

He had seized Ettie's white hand between his own strong brown ones.

"Say that you will be mine, and we will face it out together!"

"Not