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214 prise to reply intelligently the woman had said good-bye and was gone. She hurried down the pavement in the December dusk, looking neither to the right nor left. The night was cold, the air was frosty, the stars were beginning to show in the clear sky. At the corner of Grove Street and Fountain Lane Stephen Lamar met her. He came upon her suddenly and she was startled.

"You shouldn't have frightened me so," she said.

"I was waiting for you," he replied. "I knew you were in the Tracy house."

"How did you know it?"

"A socialist friend of mine saw you go in and told me."

"And what business was it of your socialist friend where I went?"

"To speak frankly, Mary, they don't like your consorting so freely with people of that class: this Tracy girl, and the fighting parson, and half-baked young Malleson and others of that ilk."

"I've told you before, Steve, that when your crowd wants my job they can have it. I'll get out any day. But—I shall choose my own friends."

"They don't want you to throw up your job. In fact you're indispensable. But it's because you are so important that your association with these people is injurious to the cause."

She half stopped and faced him.

"Steve," she said, "why did you come up here to meet me?"

It was such an abrupt breaking off of the former topic of conversation that Lamar replied awkwardly:

"Why, I—I wanted to tell you this."

"What else did you want to tell me?"

"I wanted to tell you that I heard to-day that you are likely to marry young Malleson. He's been asked if there's an engagement, and he doesn't deny it. The thing has got on my nerves. I felt that I couldn't