Miss Vance listened to her with that look of patience which those who have seen much of the real suffering of the world—­the daily portion of the poor—­have for the nervous woes of comfortable people.  March hung his head; he knew it would be useless to protest that his share of the calamity was, by comparison, infinitesimally small.

After she had heard Mrs. March to the end even of her repetitions, Miss Vance said, as if it were a mere matter of course that she should have looked the affair up, “Yes, I have seen Mr. Lindau at the hospital—­”

“My husband goes every day to see him,” Mrs. March interrupted, to give. a final touch to the conception of March’s magnanimity throughout.

“The poor man seems to have been in the wrong at the time,” said Miss Vance.

“I could almost say he had earned the right to be wrong.  He’s a man of the most generous instincts, and a high ideal of justice, of equity—­too high to be considered by a policeman with a club in his hand,” said March, with a bold defiance of his wife’s different opinion of Lindau.  “It’s the policeman’s business, I suppose, to club the ideal when he finds it inciting a riot.”

“Oh, I don’t blame Mr. Lindau; I don’t blame the policeman; he was as much a mere instrument as his club was.  I am only trying to find out how much I am to blame myself.  I had no thought of Mr. Dryfoos’s going there—­of his attempting to talk with the strikers and keep them quiet; I was only thinking, as women do, of what I should try to do if I were a man.

“But perhaps he understood me to ask him to go—­perhaps my words sent him to his death.”

She had a sort of calm in her courage to know the worst truth as to her responsibility that forbade any wish to flatter her out of it.  “I’m afraid,” said March, “that is what can never be known now.”  After a moment he added:  “But why should you wish to know?  If he went there as a peacemaker, he died in a good cause, in such a way as he would wish to die, I believe.”

“Yes,” said the girl; “I have thought of that.  But death is awful; we must not think patiently, forgivingly of sending any one to their death in the best cause.”—­“I fancy life was an awful thing to Conrad Dryfoos,” March replied.  “He was thwarted and disappointed, without even pleasing the ambition that thwarted and disappointed him.  That poor old man, his father, warped him from his simple, lifelong wish to be a minister, and was trying to make a business man of him.  If it will be any consolation to you to know it, Miss Vance, I can assure you that he was very unhappy, and I don’t see how he could ever have been happy here.”

“It won’t,” said the girl, steadily.  “If people are born into this world, it’s because they were meant to live in it.  It isn’t a question of being happy here; no one is happy, in that old, selfish way, or can be; but he could have been of great use.”

“Perhaps he was of use in dying.  Who knows?  He may have been trying to silence Lindau.”