Then there was a long pause.  Max had so much to say to her that he didn’t know where to begin.  And in the meantime to sit near her and to watch the play of the firelight on her happy face was pleasant enough.  But presently perceiving that she threw another uneasy glance in the direction of her cape, he broke the silence hastily.

“You said,” began he, abruptly, “that you were not going back to the wharf.  Where were you going, then?”

“I don’t know,” said Carrie, after a pause.

Her face had clouded again.  Her manner had changed a little also; it had become colder, more reserved.

“Do you mean that—­really?  Or do you only mean that you don’t mean to tell me, that I have no business to ask?”

“I mean just what I said—­that I didn’t know.”

“You are going to leave Mrs. Higgs and her friends, then?” asked Max, in a tone between doubt and hope.

“Yes.”

She made this answer rather by a motion of the head than by her voice.

“Well, I am very glad to hear it—­very glad.”

“Are you?  I’m not.  Oh, it is dreadful, dreadful to lose one’s home, any sort of home.”

“But could you call that a home?  A hole like that?  Among people like this Mrs. Higgs and this Dick!”

“Oh, poor Dick!  If they had all been like him it would not have mattered.”

“What!  A pickpocket!” cried Max in disgust.

“What difference did that make?  Do you suppose the wives and daughters of the men in the city, financiers and the rest, love them the less because they pass their lives trying to get the better of other people?  Isn’t it just as dishonest to issue a false prospectus to get people to put their money into worthless companies as to steal a watch?  It’s nonsense to pretend it isn’t.”

Carrie spoke sharply.  She had grown warm in defense of her felonious friend.

Max thought a little before he answered.

“But you’re not this man’s wife or his daughter.”

“Well, no.  But he wanted to marry me; and if he hadn’t been caught yesterday, perhaps I should have let him.”

“What?”

“Don’t look so disgusted.  He would have been kind to me.”

“And do you think you couldn’t find a better husband than a—­than a pickpocket?”

“He would have been honest if I’d married him,” said Carrie, quietly.

“He says so, of course; but he wouldn’t.  A man says anything to get the girl he’s fond of to promise to marry him.  Do you think it’s possible to change the habits of years, of all a man’s life, perhaps, like that?”

“I know it would have been possible,” persisted she, obstinately.  “I know I could have worried him, and nagged at him, and worked for him, till I made him do what I wanted.”

And Max saw in her face, as she looked solemnly at the fire, that dogged, steady resolution of the blue-eyed races.