She tried to stop crying by burying her face in her hands, and it made her look so much smaller and so pitiful that I picked her right up, as if she was a baby, and kissed her.  Then she cried harder, and I—­a woman over forty, too—­couldn’t find anything better to do than to cry with her.

I knew her whole story within five minutes—­knew it perfectly well before I’d fairly shown her the room and got it aired.

They were from the West, and had been married about a year.  She hadn’t a relative in the world, but his folks had friends in Philadelphia, so he’d got a place as clerk in a big clothing factory, at twelve hundred dollars a year.  They’d been keeping house, just as cozy as could be in four rooms, and were as happy as anybody in the world, when one night he didn’t come home.

She was almost frantic about him all night long, and first thing in the morning she was at the factory.  She waited until all the clerks got there, but George—­his name was George Perry—­didn’t come.  The proprietor was a good-hearted man, and went with her to the police-office, and they telegraphed all over the city; but there didn’t seem to be any such man found dead or drunk, or arrested for anything.

She hadn’t heard a word from him since.  Her husband’s family’s friends were rich—­the stuck up brutes!—­but they seemed to be annoyed by her coming so often to ask if there wasn’t any other way of looking for him, so she, like the modest, frightened little thing she was, staid away from them.  Then somebody told her that New York was the place everybody went to, so she sold all her furniture and pawned almost all her clothes, and came to New York with about fifty dollars in her pocket.

“What I’ll do when that’s gone I don’t know,” said she, commencing to cry again, “unless I find George.  I won’t live on you, though, ma’am,” she said, lifting her face up quickly out of her handkerchief; “I won’t, indeed.  I’ll go to the poorhouse first.  But—­”

Then she cried worse than before, and I cried, too, and took her in my arms, and called her a poor little thing, and told her she shouldn’t go to any poorhouse, but should stay with me and be my daughter.

I don’t know how I came to say it, for, goodness knows, I find it hard enough to keep out of the poorhouse myself, but I did say it, and I meant it, too.

Her things were all in a little valise, and she soon had the room to rights, and when I went up again in a few minutes to carry her a cup of tea, she pointed to her husband’s picture which she had hung on the wall, and asked me if I didn’t think he was very handsome.

I said yes, but I’m glad she looked at the tea instead of me, for I believe she’d seen by my face that I didn’t like her George.  The fact is, men look very differently to their wives or sweethearts than they do to older people and to boarding-house keepers.  There was nothing vicious about George Perry’s face, but if he’d been a boarder of mine, I’d have insisted on my board promptly—­not for fear of his trying to cheat me, but because if he saw anything else he wanted, he’d spend his money without thinking of what he owed.