minutes of a disturbing sound that came to him from time to time; but it
was only now that he noticed the woman was crying. She was standing with
her back to him, and he could see her lift her veil every now and then
and wipe her eyes.

With a movement of impatience, he moved further on. He had enough
troubles of his own to-night without witnessing those of others. He had
determined to stop fleeing from his thoughts and to turn and face them. A
rich young fellow, like Mac Clarke, didn't go with a girl like Nance for
nothing. Why, this thing must have been going on for months, perhaps long
before the night he had found Nance at the signal tower. They had been
meeting in secret, going out alone together; she had let him make love to
her, kiss her.

The blood surged into his head, and doubts blacker than the waters below
assailed him, but even as he stood there with his head in his hands and
his cap pulled over his eyes, all sorts of shadowy memories came to plead
for her. Memories of a little, tow-headed, independent girl coming and
going in Calvary Alley, now lugging coal up two flights of stairs, now
rushing noisily down again with a Snawdor baby slung over her shoulder,
now to snatch her part in the play. Nance, who laughed the loudest, cried
the hardest, ran the fastest, whose hand was as quick to help a friend
as to strike a foe! He saw her sitting beside him on the mattress,
sharing his disgrace on the day of the eviction, saw her standing before
the bar of justice passionately pleading his cause. Then later and
tenderer memories came to reinforce the earlier ones--memories of her
gaily dismissing all other offers at the factory to trudge home night
after night with him; of her sitting beside him in Post-Office Square,
subdued and tender-eyed, watching the electric lights bloom through the
dusk; of her nursing Uncle Jed, forgetting herself and her disappointment