When Jennie arrived at the flat it was after eleven, and the hall light was already out.
She first tried the door, and then inserted her key.
No one stirred, however, and, opening the door, she entered in the expectation of seeing Lester sternly confronting her.
He was not there, however.
The burning gas had merely been an oversight on his part.
She glanced quickly about, but seeing only the empty room, she came instantly to the other conclusion, that he had forsaken her—and so stood there, a meditative, helpless figure.
"Gone!" she thought.
At this moment his footsteps sounded on the stairs. He came in with his derby hat pulled low over his broad forehead, close to his sandy eyebrows, and with his overcoat buttoned up closely about his neck.
He took off the coat without looking at Jennie and hung it on the rack.
Then he deliberately took off his hat and hung that up also.
When he was through he turned to where she was watching him with wide eyes.
"I want to know about this thing now from beginning to end," he began.
"Whose child is that?"
Jennie wavered a moment, as one who might be going to take a leap in the dark, then opened her lips mechanically and confessed:
"It's Senator Brander's."
"Senator Brander!" echoed Lester, the familiar name of the dead but still famous statesman ringing with shocking and unexpected force in his ears.
"How did you come to know him?"
"We used to do his washing for him," she rejoined simply—"my mother and I."
Lester paused, the baldness of the statements issuing from her sobering even his rancorous mood.
"Senator Brander's child," he thought to himself.
So that great representative of the interests of the common people was the undoer of her—a self-confessed washerwoman's daughter.
A fine tragedy of low life all this was.
"How long ago was this?" he demanded, his face the picture of a darkling mood.
"It's been nearly six years now," she returned.
He calculated the time that had elapsed since he had known her, and then continued:
"How old is the child?"
"She's a little over five."
Lester moved a little.
The need for serious thought made his tone more peremptory but less bitter.
"Where have you been keeping her all this time?"
"She was at home until you went to Cincinnati last spring. I went down and brought her then."
"Was she there the times I came to Cleveland?"
"Yes," said Jennie; "but I didn't let her come out anywhere where you could see her."
"I thought you said you told your people that you were married," he exclaimed, wondering how this relationship of the child to the family could have been adjusted.
"I did," she replied, "but I didn't want to tell you about her.
They thought all the time I intended to."
"Well, why didn't you?"
"Because I was afraid."
"Afraid of what?"
"I didn't know what was going to become of me when I went with you, Lester.
I didn't want to do her any harm if I could help it.
I was ashamed, afterward; when you said you didn't like children I was afraid."
"Afraid I'd leave you?"
"Yes."
He stopped, the simplicity of her answers removing a part of the suspicion of artful duplicity which had originally weighed upon him.
After all, there was not so much of that in it as mere wretchedness of circumstance and cowardice of morals.
What a family she must have!
What queer non-moral natures they must have to have brooked any such a combination of affairs!
"Didn't you know that you'd be found out in the long run?" he at last demanded.
"Surely you might have seen that you couldn't raise her that way.