and her delicate child; she added to it in many little ways, as the opportunity was offered to her. She had written a few short stories for a particular magazine which could not afford to number famous authors among its contributors, and she had been paid for them. An accidental meeting with another occasional contributor had given her a friend; and Ralph Webster was at that time, perhaps, the only person with whom she was on terms of familiar friendship, and to whom she could talk on a moral and intellectual level. His sympathies and aspirations were not unlike her own; they always understood one another at least, even when they did not agree. To talk to him was, therefore, the opening of a new experience to her.
Language had before—at least, spoken language—been only a vehicle for the management of affairs, the expression of desires, the receipt of information. Now it served to exchange thought, to bring two lives into close mental relation with one another, to console, to suggest, to sustain. And she had thought he loved her. He was a little more prosperous in the world than herself, and he did not guess that she was so very poor; but he was not rich enough to make her feel that she would take much more than she gave if she became his wife. They would work together, as they lived together, and loved together. She had thought, with others,
"Our work shall still be better for our love,
And still our love be sweeter for our work,
And both commended, for the sake of each,
By all true workers and true lovers born."
And then he had received an appointment to travel as special correspondent to a great paper, and he had come to say good-bye to her, and before saying goodbye had told her this story. She had taken it for a final farewell. Since his going, three days before, she had thought of nothing else. She had work to do, but she could not do it. How could she throw herself into dream-loves and dream-troubles with this pain of loss and loneliness at her heart? And yet the work was necessary, and she dared not delay it longer than that night.
"He told her this story."
She had, the day before, received back from her editor a story which she had hoped he would accept, with the intimation that if she would write him one half as long, to be ready in two days, he would almost certainly take it, as he wished to fill up a corresponding gap in the next number of his magazine.
She urgently needed the money. Her baby, little Lorna, was paler and thinner even than usual; the doctor whom she consulted said that the child needed country air. She had hoped to earn enough money to take it away for some weeks to a farm-house, when she sent that story to the editor of the magazine. She must not lose the opportunity which he had offered in its place. She had thought of a plot—a foolish little commonplace affair—but she could not breathe any life into it. When she forced her thoughts into the necessary channel they flowed back again to another story. She saw Ralph Webster standing
