women. But if it hadn't been for Mahoney--"

"Then," interrupted the dentist, "he'd been good enough to let you alone
for most a year, and I thought you were out of your troubles."

"I knew he would come back," she interposed quietly.

"But now he comes back just as everything is nice, and worse, you come
across him when he is nigh bein' shot to death. Then, worse yet, by what
the papers said, you went to the hospital with him and gave the whole thing
away. When I saw the name, Alves Preston, printed out, I swore."

Mrs. Preston smiled at his vehemence.

"Tell me, Alves," the old man asked in a rambling manner, "how did you ever
come to marry him? I've wanted to ask you that from the first."

Mrs. Preston rose from the chair and pulled her cloak about her.

"I couldn't make you understand; I don't myself _now_."

"D'yer love him?" the dentist persisted, not ungently.

"Should I be here if I did?" she flashed resentfully. "I was a country girl
away at school, more foolish than one of those dumb Swedes in my class, and
he--"

But she turned again to the window, with an impatient gesture.

"It is something wrong in a woman," she murmured. "But she has no chance,