tell."

"Nonsense. I come down the street in my boat. A white-faced gentleman
with a cigarette looks out from a window when I stop at the door, and
ducks back when I glance up. I come in and find a pet dog, obviously
overfed at ordinary times, whining with hunger on the stairs. As
I prepare to feed him, a pale woman comes down, trying to put a
right-hand glove on her left hand, and with her jacket wrong side out.
What am I to think?"

I started and looked at my coat. He was right. And when, as I tried to
take it off, he helped me, and even patted me on the shoulder--what
with his kindness, and the long morning alone, worrying, and the
sleepless night, I began to cry. He had a clean handkerchief in my
hand before I had time to think of one.

"That's it," he said. "It will do you good, only don't make a noise
about it. If it's a husband on the annual flood spree, don't worry,
madam. They always come around in time to whitewash the cellars."

"It isn't a husband," I sniffled.

"Tell me about it," he said. There was something so kindly in his
face, and it was so long since I had had a bit of human sympathy, that
I almost broke down again.

I sat there, with a crowd of children paddling on a raft outside the
window, and Molly Maguire, next door, hauling the morning's milk up in
a pail fastened to a rope, her doorway being too narrow to admit the
milkman's boat, and I told him the whole story.