poor kids over there.  You’re right.  Those girls have rotten homes.  The whole family gathers in the parlor right after dinner.  Pa takes his shoes off, and props his socks up before the stove; Ma begins to hear a kid his spelling; and other kids start the graphophone, and Aggie is expected to ask her young man to walk right in.  So after that she meets him in the street, and the girls begin to talk about Aggie.”

“Oh, Barry, I’m so glad you’re interested!” Standing a step above him, Sidney’s ardent face was very close to his own.  “Of course we can do it,” she said.

“We!” he echoed almost bitterly.  “You’ll do it; you’re the one—­” He broke off with a short, embarrassed laugh.  “I was going to cut that sort of thing out,” he said gruffly, “but all roads lead to Rome, it seems.  I can’t talk to you five minutes without—­and I’ve got to go.  I said I’d look in at the office.”

“You seem to be afraid to be friendly lately, Barry,” said Mrs. Burgoyne in a hurt voice, flinging away the rose she had been holding, “but don’t you think our friendship means something to me, too?  I don’t like you to talk as if I did all the giving and you all the taking.  I don’t know how the girls and I would get along without your advice and help here at the Hall.  I think,” her voice broke into a troubled laugh, “I think you forget that the quality of friendship is not strained.”

“Sidney,” he said with sudden resolution, turning to face her bravely, “I can’t be just friends with you.  You’re so much the finest, so much the best—­” He left the sentence unfinished, and began again:  “You have a hundred men friends; you can’t realize what you mean to me.  You—­but you know what you are, and I’m the editor of a mortgaged country paper, a man who has made a mess of things, who can’t take care of his kid, or himself, on his job without help--”

“Barry—­” she began breathlessly, but he interrupted her.

“Listen to me,” he said huskily, taking both her warm hands in his, “I want to tell you something.  Say that I was weak enough to forget all that, your money and my poverty, your life and my life, everything that puts you as far above me as the moon and stars; say that I could do that—­although I hope it’s not true—­even then—­even then I’m not free, Sidney.  There is Hetty, you know; there is Billy’s mother—­”

There was a silence.  Sidney slowly freed her hands, laid one upon her heart as unconsciously as a hurt child, and the other upon his shoulder.  Her troubled eyes searched his face.

“Barry,” she said with a little effort, “have I been mistaken in thinking Billy’s mother was dead?”