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“Pardon me for breaking in on you, sir,” she said, fighting hard to keep her temper, “but neither am I a socialist or a Bolshevik.”

“Then I reckon probably you’re one of these rampant suffragists. Anyhow, what’s the use of discussing abstracts? If you don’t like the law why don’t you have it changed?”

“That’s one of the very things I hope before long to try to do,” she replied.

“It’ll keep you pretty busy,” he responded with a sniff of profound disapproval. “But then you seem to have a lot of spare time on your hands to spend in crusading round. Well, I haven’t. I’ve got my patients to see to. One of ’em is waiting for me now–if you’ll kindly excuse me?”

She rose.

“I’m sorry,” she said sincerely, “if either my mission or my language has irritated you. I seem somehow to have defeated the purpose that brought me–I mean a faint hope that perhaps somehow I might help that girl. Something tells me–call it intuition or sentimentality or what you will–but something tells me I must keep on trying to help her. I only wish I could make you share my point of view.”

“Well, you can’t. Say, see here, why don’t you go to see the mother? I judge she might convince you that you are on the wrong tack, even if I can’t.”

“That’s exactly what I mean to do,” she declared.

Something inside her brain gave a little jump. It was curious that she had not thought of it before; even more curious that his labored sarcasms had been required to set her on this new trail.

“Well, at that, you’d better think twice before you go,” he retorted. “She was a mighty badly broken-up woman the last time I saw her, but even so I judge she’s still got spunk enough left in her to resent having an unauthorized and uninvited stranger coming about, seeking to pry into her own private sorrow. But it’s your affair, not mine. Besides, judging by everything, you probably don’t think my advice is worth much anyhow.”

“Oh, yes, but I do–I do indeed! And I thank you for it.”

“Don’t mention it! And good day!”

The slamming of the inner door behind him made an appropriate exclamation point to punctuate the brevity of his offended and indignant departure. For a moment she felt like laughing outright. Then she felt like crying. Then she did neither. She left.

“Poor, old opinionated, stupid old, conscientious old thing!” she was saying to herself as she let herself, unattended, out of the front door. “And yet I’ll wager he would sit up all night and work his fingers to the bone trying to save a life. And when it comes to serving poor people without expecting payment or even asking for it, I know he is a perfect dear. Besides, I should be grateful to him–he gave me an idea. I don’t know where he got it from either–I don’t believe he ever had so very many of his own.”

Again the handy cop in the communal center set her upon her way. But when she came to the destination she sought–a small, rather shabby cottage standing a mile or so westward from the middle of things communal, out in the fringes of the village where outlying homesteads tailed away into avowed farmsteads–the house itself was closed up fast and tight. The shutters all were closely drawn and against the gatepost was fastened a newly painted sign reading: “For Sale or Rent. Apply to Searle, the Up-to-Date Real Estate Man, Next Door to Pythian Hall.”

Not quite sure she had stopped at the right place, Miss Smith hailed a man pottering in a chrysanthemum bed in the yard of the adjoining cottage.

“Mrs. Vinsolving?” he said, lifting a tousled head above his palings. “Yessum, she lives there–leastwise she did. She moved away only the day before yesterday. Sort of sudden, I think it must have been. I didn’t know she was going till she was gone.” He grinned in extenuation of the unaccountable failure of a small-town man to acquaint himself with all available facts regarding a neighbor’s private affairs. “But then she never wasn’t much of a hand, Mrs. Vinsolving wasn’t, for mixing with folks. I’ll say she wasn’t!”