“If you live here long you vill get your proof. But I forget that you are yourself one of them. You vill soon be as bad as the rest. But you vill find other lodgings, mister. I cannot have you here. Is it not bad enough that one of these people come courting my Ettie, and that I dare not turn him down, but that I should have another for my boarder? Yes, indeed, you shall not sleep here after to-night!”

McMurdo found himself under sentence of banishment both from his comfortable quarters and from the girl whom he loved. He found her alone in the sitting-room that same evening, and he poured his troubles into her ear.

“Sure, your father is after giving me notice,” he said. “It’s little I would care if it was just my room, but indeed, Ettie, though it’s only a week that I’ve known you, you are the very breath of life to me, and I can’t live without you!”

“Oh, hush, Mr. McMurdo, don’t speak so!” said the girl. “I have told you, have I not, that you are too late? There is another, and if I have not promised to marry him at once, at least I can promise no one else.”

“Suppose I had been first, Ettie, would I have had a chance?”

The girl sank her face into her hands. “I wish to heaven that you had been first!” she sobbed.

McMurdo was down on his knees before her in an instant. “For God’s sake, Ettie, let it stand at that!” he cried. “Will you ruin your life and my own for the sake of this promise? Follow your heart, acushla! ’Tis a safer guide than any promise before you knew what it was that you were saying.”

He had seized Ettie’s white hand between his own strong brown ones.

“Say that you will be mine, and we will face it out together!”

“Not here?”

“Yes, here.”

“No, no, Jack!” His arms were round her now. “It could not be here. Could you take me away?”

A struggle passed for a moment over McMurdo’s face; but it ended by setting like granite. “No, here,” he said. “I’ll hold you against the world, Ettie, right here where we are!”

“Why should we not leave together?”

“No, Ettie, I can’t leave here.”

“But why?”

“I’d never hold my head up again if I felt that I had been driven out. Besides, what is there to be afraid of? Are we not free folks in a free country? If you love me, and I you, who will dare to come between?”

“You don’t know, Jack. You’ve been here too short a time. You don’t know this Baldwin. You don’t know McGinty and his Scowrers.”