"You've told him you were going off to live with William?"
"Yes, miss; there's nothing like telling the whole truth while you're about it. I told him I was going off to-night."
"He's a very religious young man?"
"Yes, miss; he spoke to me about religion, but I told him I didn't want Jackie to be a fatherless boy, and to lose any money he might have a right to. It don't look right to go and live with a married man; but you knows, miss, how I'm situated, and you knows that I'm only doing it because it seems for the best."
"What did he say to that?"
"Nothing much, miss, except that I might get left a second time—and, he wasn't slow to add, with another child."
"Have you thought of that danger, Esther?"
"Yes, miss, I've thought of everything; but thinking don't change nothing. Things remain just the same, and you've to chance it in the end—leastways a woman has. Not on the likes of you, miss, but the likes of us."
"Yes," said Miss Rice reflectively, "it is always the woman who is sacrificed." And her thought went back for a moment to the novel she was writing. It seemed to her pale and conventional compared with this rough page torn out of life. She wondered if she could treat the subject. She passed in review the names of some writers who could do justice to it, and then her eyes went from her bookcase to Esther.
"So you're going to live in a public-house, Esther? You're going to-night?
I've paid you everything I owe you?"