m the passion of
a woman.

"Our home is yours, just as long as you can bear the monotony of our
simple lives," he said, in his quiet way, but it was deep-throated and
unmistakable in its sincerity.

She laid her hand on his arm and clasped it hard, then turned away her
head, and they rode in silence.

After they left the car, Allen sat with savage eyes and grimly set
mouth, going over the problem again and again. He saw that young and
helpless creature walking the gantlet between endless ranks of lustful,
remorseless men, snatching at her in selfish, bestial desire.

It made him bitter and despairing to think that women should be
helpless--that they should need some man to protect them against some
other man. He cursed the laws and traditions that had kept women
subordinate and trivial and deceptive and vacillating. He wished they
could be raised to the level of the brutes till, like the tigress or
she-wolf, they could not only defend themselves, but their young.

He tried to breathe a sigh of relief that she had gone out of his life
but--he could not. It was not so easy to shake off the shadow of his
responsibility. He followed her on her downward path till he saw her
stretching out her hands in pitiful need to casual acquaintances--alone
and without hope; still petite, still dainty in spite of all, still with
flashes of wit, and then----

He shuddered. "O my God! Upon whom does the burden of guilt lie?"

* * * * *

On the night of his return he sat among his romping babes debating
whether he should tell the story to his wife or not. As the little ones
grew weary, the noise of the autumn wind--the lonely, woeful, moaning
prairie wind--came to his ears and he shuddered. His wife observed it.

"What is it, Joe? Did you get a chill?"

"Oh, no. The wind sounds a little lonesome to-night, that's all." But he
took his little girl into his arms and held her close.

IV. THE PASSING STRANGER.

This was the story the mystic told:

It was about eleven o'clock of an October night. The street was one of
the worst of the city, but it was Monday--one of its quiet nights.

The saloons flared floods of feverish light upon the walk, and breathed
their terrible odors, like caverns leading downward into hell. Restless,
loitering crowds moved to and fro, with rasping, uncertain footsteps,
out of which the click of health had gone.

Policemen occasionally showed themselves menacingly, and t