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spoke again, her tone was more friendly and apologetic. “I’m not really ungrateful,” she said; “it was very good of you to save me from those men.”

“But why?” repeated the obstinate and dazed MacIan, “why did you save us from the other men? I mean the policemen?”

The girl’s great brown eyes were lit up with a flash that was at once final desperation and the loosening of some private and passionate reserve.

“Oh, God knows!” she cried. “God knows that if there is a God He has turned His big back on everything. God knows I have had no pleasure in my life, though I am pretty and young and father has plenty of money. And then people come and tell me that I ought to do things and I do them and it’s all drivel. They want you to do work among the poor; which means reading Ruskin and feeling self-righteous in the best room in a poor tenement. Or to help some cause or other, which always means bundling people out of crooked houses, in which they’ve always lived, into straight houses, in which they quite as often die. And all the time you have inside only the horrid irony of your own empty head and empty heart. I am to give to the unfortunate, when my