When I turned, Miss Connor eyed me. “You look tired,” she said. “Come to my room and I’ll give you a cup of tea. It’s hard work, looking for a job.”

I felt guiltier than ever, for when we went to her room—not much larger than Marguerite’s had been—she not only put a teakettle on a small electric stove in the bathroom. She hurried out to a grocery store. “If you don’t mind my leaving you,” she said rather breathlessly. “You just sit down and rest yourself. I won’t be long.”

I was ready to give up when she came back, her arms full of parcels. But she would not let me go.

“Don’t be foolish,” she said. “I’ll just boil you a couple of eggs. They’re filling and they keep up the strength. You can rest on my bed until they’re ready.”

I could not do that. I was hideously ashamed of the whole performance. I sat in a chair while she took the lamp off the table and spread a clean towel over it. “It’s a long time since I had company,” she said. “Marguerite used to come in now and then. Once on Sunday morning I cooked her a kipper. Dear me, how long ago that seems.”

It was a long time, a decade and a half of loneliness. No wonder she cherished her memories of that bit of romance whose edge she had touched so long ago.

“I remember seeing her off,” she said. “I said she wasn’t exactly pretty, but she was that day. I was crying because I knew it was all wrong, but she put her arms around me and told me not to worry. She’d be married as soon as Morgan’s wife got a divorce, and she’d write me often. She never did, of course. What was there to write about?”

“You’ve never seen her since?”

“Never, or heard from her. I’ve lain in that bed often and wondered what became of her. She wasn’t the kind to make her own way.”

Any belief that Bessie had been the Weston girl died at that. If ever a woman was able to manage her life it was Bessie Wainwright.

I managed the two eggs, tea, bread and butter. I even got down the chocolate wafers which I knew had been sheer extravagance, and at the end Miss Connor sat back and eyes me complacently. “Nothing like good food to give you courage,” she said.

It was some time before I brought her back to Marguerite and the snapshot, and she was an even longer time before she located it. When she did she carried it to the lamp—it was dark by then—and studied it.

“It’s not very good,” she observed. “I had one of those dollar cameras, and she had a new dress. I took it here, in the back yard.”

Then at last she gave it to me, and I took one look and felt the room whirling around me. I put out a hand to steady myself and Miss Connor caught me. “Here!” she said. “Maybe you ate too fast. Lie down a minute.”