zen such miserable creatures, I felt myself one of them and
never wanted to go out at this hour again.

"Don't you believe this part of my story," she suddenly asked, looking up
into Mr. Ransom's troubled face? "Ask the policeman who tramps about
those streets every night; he'll tell you."

The question on Ransom's lips died. What use of asking what she could not
hear.

"I wish I knew what you were thinking," she now murmured softly, so
softly that he hardly caught the words. "But I never shall, I never
shall. I will tell you now how I became deaf," she promised after a
moment of wistful gazing. "Is there any one near? Can anybody hear me?"
she continued, with a suspicious look about her.

He shook his head. It was the first movement he had made since she began
her story.

This apparently reassured her, for she proceeded at once to say:

"Mother Duda had never told me anything about herself. It scared me then
when one morning I found sitting at the breakfast table a man who she
said was her son. He was big and pale looking, and had a slight swelling
on one side of his neck which made me sick; but I tried to be polite,
though I did not like him at all and had a sudden feeling of having no
home any more. That was the first day. The next two were worse. For he
didn't hate me as I did him, and wouldn't leave the house while I was
there, saying he could not bear to be away from his mother. But he
skipped out quick enough after I was gone, so the neighbors said, and
sometimes I think he followed me. Mother Duda wasn't like her old self at
all. She loved him, he was her son, but she didn't like all he did. She
wanted him to work; he wouldn't work. He sat and stared at me as the
gipsy king used to stare, and if I grew red and hot it was from shame and
fear and horror of the great throat I saw growing from day to day, and
which would some time be like his mother's. He knew I didn't like him,
but he wasn't good like Mother Duda, and told me one day that he was
going to make me his wife, whether I wanted him to or not, and talked
about a great secret, and the big man he would be some day. This made me
angry, and I said that all the bigness he would ever have would be in his
neck. At which he struck me, right across the ear, hard, so hard that I
fell on the floor with a scream, and Mother Duda came running. He was
sorry then and threw down the thing he had in his hand; but the harm had
been done and I was sick a month and had