ld not realize it to see us now but we were poor
then," he said. "It's true. We lived in a little house on the side of a
hill. Once when there was a storm the wind nearly swept our house away.
How the wind blew. Our father was a carpenter and he built strong houses
for other people but our own house he did not build very strongly." He
shook his head sorrowfully. "My sister the actress has got into trouble.
Our house is not built very strongly," he said as I went away along the
path.

For a month, two months, the Chicago newspapers, that are delivered
every morning in our village, have been filled with the story of a
murder. A man there has murdered his wife and there seems no reason for
the deed. The tale runs something like this--

The man, who is now on trial in the courts and will no doubt be hanged,
worked in a bicycle factory where he was a foreman, and lived with his
wife and his wife's mother in an apartment in Thirty-Second Street. He
loved a girl who worked in the office of the factory where he was
employed. She came from a town in Iowa and when she first came to the
city lived with her aunt who has since died. To the foreman, a heavy
stolid-looking man with gray eyes, she seemed the most beautiful woman
in the world. Her desk was by a window at an angle of the factory, a
sort of wing of the building, and the foreman, down in the shop, had a
desk by another window. He sat at his desk making out sheets containing
the record of the work done by each man in his department. When he
looked up he could see the girl sitting at work at her desk. The notion
got into his head that she was peculiarly lovely. He did not think of
trying to draw close to her or of winning her love. He looked at her as
one might look at a star or across a country of low hills in October
when the leaves of the trees are all red and yellow gold. "She is a
pure, virginal thing," he thought vaguely. "What can she be thinking
about as she sits there by the window at work?"

In fancy the foreman took the girl from Iowa home with him to his
apartment in Thirty-Second Street and into the presence of his wife and
his mother-in-law. All day in the shop and during the evening at home he
carried her figure about with him in his mind. As he stood by a window
in his apartment and looked out toward the Illinois Central railroad
tracks and beyond the tracks to the lake, the girl was there beside him.
Down below women walked in the street and in every woman