"Alida," said Holcroft gravely, "I've not forgotten your story, and you
shouldn't forget mine. Be sensible now. Don't I look old enough to
know what I'm about?"

"Oh, oh, oh!" she cried impetuously, "if I were only sure it was right!
It may be business to you, but it seems like life or death to me. It's
more than death--I don't fear that--but I do fear life, I do fear the
desperate struggle just to maintain a bare, dreary existence. I do
dread going out among strangers and seeing their cold curiosity and
their scorn. You can't understand a woman's heart. It isn't right for
me to die till God takes me, but life has seemed so horrible, meeting
suspicion on one side and cruel, significant looks of knowledge on the
other. I've been tortured even here by these wretched hags, and I've
envied even them, so near to death, yet not ashamed like me. I know,
and you should know, that my heart is broken, crushed, trampled into
the mire. I had felt that for me even the thought of marriage again
would be a mockery, a wicked thing, which I would never have a right to
entertain.--I never dreamt that anyone would think of such a thing,
knowing what you know. Oh, oh! Why have you tempted me so if it is
not right? I must do right. The feeling that I've not meant to do
wrong is all that has kept me from despair. But can it be right to let
you take me from the street, the poorhouse, with nothing to give but a
blighted name, a broken heart and feeble hands! See, I am but the
shadow of what I was, and a dark shadow at that. I could be only a
dismal shadow at any man's hearth. Oh, oh! I've thought and suffered
until my reason seemed going. You don't realize, you don't know the
depths into which I've fallen. It can't be right."

Holcroft was almost appalled at this passionate outburst in one who
thus far had been sad, indeed, yet self-controlled. He looked at her
in mingled pity and consternation. His own troubles had seemed heavy
enough, but he now caught glimpses of something far beyond trouble--of
agony, of mortal dread that bordered on despair. He could scarcely
comprehend how terrible to a woman like Alida were the recent events of
her life, and how circumstances, with illness, had all tended to create
a morbid horror of her situation. Like himself she was naturally
reticent in regard to her deeper feelings, patient and undemonstrative.
Had not his words evoked this outburst she might have suffered and died
in sil