n after her birth. Not her grandfather who in
the end had given her his name. Was it her mother's mother who had tried
to hide the family shame? She shrewdly suspected so. Well, she had not
succeeded, for here was Hertha Ogilvie, after all. It was not so easy to
hide a white child, not so easy to stifle the spirit of remorse.

As she sat in her chair, her eyes half closed, she found her thoughts,
as so often happened, drifting back to her home among the pines, to the
cabin with the white sand at the doorway and the red roses clambering
over the porch. Instead of coming home to this empty flat, Ellen and her
mother and Tom were on hand to welcome her. They helped take off her
things, they dried her shoes, they gave her hot coffee to drink. Was it
foolish to have gone away to enter the life of this ruthless city that
held you in a mad whirl of work for half the year and for the other half
left you to starve; this city in which there was no time for a pleasant
homecoming and an evening meal together; this city in which you met a
friendly face and lost it again in the great crowds that swarmed in
millions over the miles of narrow streets? Her head drooped as though
nodding yes to her questions, and her eyes wholly closed.

But just then the doorbell rang.

CHAPTER XX

It was the bell of the outer door, and Hertha went to the kitchen to
push the button that released the latch. Who could be coming to see
Kathleen, she thought, on such a wretched night? Of course, some one who
needed her services as nurse; and, going into the hall, she opened the
outer door of the flat the better to guide the stranger upstairs.

"May I come in?"

It was a very wet figure that stood before her clasping a hat in one
hand and in the other a large cotton umbrella that dripped puddles of
water upon the floor. The question was asked in a jovial tone, and yet
the man's attitude betrayed something like timidity.

"Certainly," Hertha answered. "Give me your umbrella; it's very wet."

"No, tell me where to put it; you mustn't get any of this rain on you,"
and Richard Shelby Brown followed Hertha as she led the way into the
kitchen.

Together they put the umbrella into the washtub where it could drip
harmlessly, and then, divested of his coat and hat, the young man went
with his hostess into the front room where she insisted that he sit
close to the radiator to get dry.

When she had seated him to her satisfaction and was back in her c