“His girl took up with another man, and Joe has hot Italian blood.  He got drunk one night and—­shot them both.”  There was another silence.  “I did what I could,” she said harshly, “but he had a bad record behind him, and the young assistant district attorney had his own record to think of, too.  So Joe got a death sentence.  We appealed the case but it did no good.  He was sent up the river and is in the death house now—­and he sent for me to come to-day.  His letter hinted he was scared, he wrote that his priest was no good to him.  So I went up this afternoon.  Joe goes to the chair to-morrow at six.”

Deborah went to the sofa and sat down inertly.  Roger remained motionless, and a dull chill crept over him.

“So you see my work is personal,” he heard her mutter presently.  All at once she seemed so far away, such a stranger to him in this life of hers.

“By George, it’s horrible!” he said.  “I’m sorry you went to see the boy!”

“I’m glad,” was his daughter’s quick retort.  “I’ve been getting much too sure of myself—­of my school, I mean, and what it can do.  I needed this to bring me back to the kind of world we live in!”

“What do you mean?” he roughly asked.

“I mean there are schools and prisons!  And gallows and electric chairs!  And I’m for schools!  They’ve tried their jails and gallows for whole black hideous centuries!  What good have they done?  If they’d given Joe back to the school and me, I’d have had him a fireman in a year!  I know, because I studied him hard!  He’d have grown fighting fires, he would have saved lives!”

Again she stopped, with a catch of her breath.  In suspense he watched her angry struggle to regain control of herself.  She sat bolt upright, rigid; her birthmark showed a fiery red.  In a few moments he saw her relax.

“But of course,” she added wearily, “it’s much more complex than that.  A school is nothing nowadays—­just by itself alone, I mean—­it’s only a part of a city’s life—­which for most tenement children is either very dull and hard, or cheap and false and overexciting.  And behind all that lie the reasons for that.  And there are so many reasons.”  She stared straight past her father as though at something far away.  Then she seemed to recall herself:  “But I’m talking too much of my family.”

Roger carefully lit a cigar: 

“I don’t think you are, my dear.  I’d like to hear more about it.”  She smiled: 

“To keep my mind off Joe, you mean.”

“And mine, too,” he answered.

They had a long talk that evening about her hope of making her school what Roger visaged confusedly as a kind of mammoth home, the center of a neighborhood, of one prodigious family.  At times when the clock on the mantle struck the hour loud and clear, there would fall a sudden silence, as both thought of what was to happen at dawn.  But quickly Roger would question again and Deborah would talk steadily on.  It was after midnight when she stopped.