an."

"Silence!" the Burgomaster cried. "Silence!"

She broke off, but only to throw her whole soul into one breathless cry.

"Will he marry her?" she panted; and she held out her hands to him, palm
uppermost. "Will he marry her? In a word."

"No," the Burgomaster answered grimly.

She flung up her arms.

"Then beware!" she cried wildly, and for the first time she raised her
voice to the pitch of those other shrews. "Beware! You and yours have
brought us to shame; but the end is not yet, the end is not yet! You do
not know us."

At that he rallied himself. "I may not know you yet," he said hardily,
and indeed brutally; "but I know this, that such things as these come,
woman, of people setting themselves up to be better than their
neighbours, when they are as poor as church mice. They come of slighting
honest fellows and setting caps at those above you. Your daughter--or
you, woman, if you like it better--set the trap, and you are caught in
it yourselves. That is all."

"You wretch!" she gasped. "And he--will not marry her?"

"Not while I live," he answered firmly.

"And that is your last word?"

"It is," he said. "My very last."

He was on his guard, prepared to defend himself even against actual
violence. For he knew what angry women were and of what they were
capable even against a Burgomaster. But after a tense pause of suspense,
during every moment of which he expected her to fall upon him, she said
only, "Where is he?"

"I shall not tell you," he answered. "Nor would it help you if you
knew!"

"And that is all?"

"That is all."

It was not their first interview. She had pled with him before, and
knelt and wept and abased herself before him. She had done all that the
love that tore her heartstrings--the love that made it so much more
difficult to see her child suffer than to suffer herself, the love that
every moment painted the bare room at home, and her daughter prostrate
there in shame and despair--she had done all that even love could
suggest. There was no room therefore for farther pleading, for farther
prayers; she had threatened, and she had failed. What, then, remained to
be done?

Nothing, the Burgomaster thought, as in a flash of triumph and relief he
watched her go, outfaced and defeated. Nothing; and he hugged himself on
the prudence that had despatched his son out of the way in time, and
rendered a match with that proud pauper brat impossible. Nothing; but to
the woman, as she we