“You mean—?”

“I mean that finer and better men than Louis Latz aren’t lying around loose.  A man who treated his mother like a queen and who worked himself up from selling newspapers on the street to a millionaire.”

“Mamma?”

“Yes, baby.  He asked me to-night.  Come to me, Alma; stay with me close.  He asked me to-night.”

“What?”

“You know.  Haven’t you seen it coming for weeks?  I have.”

“Seen what?”

“Don’t make mamma come out and say it.  For eight years I’ve been as grieving a widow to a man as a woman could be.  But I’m human, Alma, and he—­asked me to-night.”

There was a curious pallor came over Miss Samstag’s face, as if smeared there by a hand.

“Asked you what?”

“Alma, it don’t mean I’m not true to your father as I was the day I buried him in that blizzard back there, but could you ask for a finer, steadier man than Louis Latz?  It looks out of his face.”

“Mamma, you—­What—­are you saying?”

“Alma?”

There lay a silence between them that took on the roar of a simoon and Miss Samstag jumped then from her mother’s embrace, her little face stiff with the clench of her mouth.

“Mamma—­you—­No—­no!  Oh, mamma—­oh—!”

A quick spout of hysteria seemed to half strangle Mrs. Samstag so that she slanted backward, holding her throat.

“I knew it.  My own child against me.  O God!  Why was I born?  My own child against me!”

“Mamma—­you can’t marry him.  You can’t marry—­anybody.”

“Why can’t I marry anybody?  Must I be afraid to tell my own child when a good man wants to marry me and give us both a good home?  That’s my thanks for making my child my first consideration—­before I accepted him.”

“Mamma, you didn’t accept him.  Darling, you wouldn’t do a—­thing like that!”

Miss Samstag’s voice thickened up then quite frantically into a little scream that knotted in her throat, and she was suddenly so small and stricken that, with a gasp for fear she might crumple up where she stood, Mrs. Samstag leaned forward, catching her again by the sash.

“Alma!”

It was only for an instant, however.  Suddenly Miss Samstag was her coolly firm little self, the bang of authority back in her voice.

“You can’t marry Louis Latz.”

“Can’t I?  Watch me.”

“You can’t do that to a nice, deserving fellow like him!”

“Do what?”

“That!”

Then Mrs. Samstag threw up both her hands to her face, rocking in an agony of self-abandon that was rather horrid to behold.

“O God! why don’t you put me out of it all?  My misery!  I’m a leper to my own child!”

“Oh—­mamma—!”