“I said everything—­yes,” he replied.  “But if you would like to know—­”

“Perhaps I had better tell you something first.  I had just parted with him—­it couldn’t have been more than half an hour—­in front of Brentano’s; he must have gone straight to his death.  We were talking, and I—­I said, Why didn’t some one go among the strikers and plead with them to be peaceable, and keep them from attacking the new men.  I knew that he felt as I did about the strikers:  that he was their friend.  Did you see—­do you know anything that makes you think he had been trying to do that?”

“I am sorry,” March began, “I didn’t see him at all till—­till I saw him lying dead.”

“My husband was there purely by accident,” Mrs. March put in.  “I had begged and entreated him not to go near the striking anywhere.  And he had just got out of the car, and saw the policeman strike that wretched Lindau—­he’s been such an anxiety to me ever since we have had anything to do with him here; my husband knew him when he was a boy in the West.  Mr. March came home from it all perfectly prostrated; it made us all sick!  Nothing so horrible ever came into our lives before.  I assure you it was the most shocking experience.”

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.”