“So be it,” the mother said. “It’s not long enough, but I can see that you know what you’re doing. I was beside myself that night she went out, wondering what had become of her, and when she got back and I heard what she’d done I got onto her. I was ready to kill her. I finally asked her if there was any excuse she wanted to make for herself, and do you know what she said to me? She said, ‘But, Ma,’ she said, ‘they would all have been laughing at him if I hadn’t turned up.’ Did you ever hear the like of that in your life? They would all have been laughing at him, and of course she couldn’t have that, oh, no, they mustn’t laugh at him, even though she hardly knew the fellow, except to say hello to, and so to save his face she must go and put herself in the way of being laughed at and worse — laughed at and talked about. I don’t know what they didn’t say about her. I had to force her out to Mass the next Sunday, and the Sunday after that. But she didn’t want him to be laughed at. And she thought that was a good enough reason for what she did.”

Stephen’s Green Park is enclosed behind high iron railings and it is surrounded on all four sides by broad, busy streets. Mr. Derdon had walked along the west side of the green, keeping on the far side of the street from the park, and along the south side, past the massive-fronted city houses that had so impressed Rose when she first saw them. Now he made his way along the east side, past St. Vincent’s Hospital and the college, and he found himself on the corner of Somerville Street. He stopped on the corner and gazed along the narrow, gray street, which was closed at its far end by three houses. It was in one of the houses along the side where he stood that Rose and he had had their first home. He couldn’t remember the number of the house, and he was not inclined to walk along and look to see if he could remember the house when he came to it, but he knew it was one along toward the end of the row.