All Edith’s caution was forgotten in her shame and anger.

“Yes, I know,” she said, hysterically, “but I won’t tell you.  And I won’t marry him.  I hate him.  If you go to him he’ll beat you to death.”  Suddenly the horrible picture of Dan in Akers’ brutal hands overwhelmed her.  “Dan, you won’t go?” she begged.  “He’ll kill you.”

“A lot you’d care,” he said, coldly.  “As if we didn’t have enough already!  As if you couldn’t have married Joe Wilkinson, next door, and been a decent woman.  And instead, you’re a—­”

“Be quiet, Dan,” Willy Cameron interrupted him.  “That sort of talk doesn’t help any.  Edith is right.  If you go to Akers there will be a fight.  And that’s no way to protect her.”

“God!” Dan muttered.  “With all the men in the world, to choose that rotten anarchist!”

It was sordid, terribly tragic, the three of them sitting there in the badly lighted little room around the disordered table, with Ellen grimly listening in the doorway, and the odors of cooking still heavy in the air.  Edith sat there, her hands on the table, staring ahead, and recounted her wrongs.  She had never had a chance.  Home had always been a place to get away from.  Nobody had cared what became of her.  And hadn’t she tried to get out of the way?  Only they all did their best to make her live.  She wished she had died.

Dan, huddled low in his chair, his legs sprawling, stared at nothing with hopeless eyes.

Afterwards Willy Cameron could remember nothing of the scene in detail.  He remembered its setting, but of all the argument and quarreling only one thing stood out distinctly, and that was Edith’s acceptance of Dan’s accusation.  It was Akers, then.  And Lily Cardew was going to marry him.  Was in love with him.

“Does he know how things are?” he asked.

She nodded.  “Yes.”

“Does he offer to do anything?”

“Him?  He does not.  And don’t you go to him and try to get him to marry me.  I tell you I’d die first.”

He left them there, sitting in the half light, and going out into the hall picked up his hat.  Mrs. Boyd heard him and called to him, and before he went out he ran upstairs to her room.  It seemed to him, as he bent over her, that her lips were bluer than ever, her breath a little shallower and more difficult.  Her untouched supper tray was beside her.

“I wasn’t hungry,” she explained.  “Seems to me, Willy, if you’d let me go downstairs so I could get some of my own cooking I’d eat better.  Ellen’s all right, but I kind o’ crave sweet stuff, and she don’t like making desserts.”

“You’ll be down before long,” he assured her.  “And making me pies.  Remember those pies you used to bake?”

“You always were a great one for my pies,” she said, complacently.

He kissed her when he left.  He had always marveled at the strange lack of demonstrativeness in the household, and he knew that she valued his small tendernesses.