IN THE BISHOP'S CARRIAGE

By

MIRIAM MICHELSON

[I] [II] [III] [IV] [V] [VI] [VII] [VIII] [IX]
[X] [XI] [XII] [XIII] [XIV] [XV] [XVI] [XVII]

I.

When the thing was at its hottest, I bolted. Tom, like the darling he is—(Yes, you are, old fellow, you're as precious to me as—as you are to the police—if they could only get their hands on you)—well, Tom drew off the crowd, having passed the old gentleman's watch to me, and I made for the women's rooms.

The station was crowded, as it always is in the afternoon, and in a minute I was strolling into the big, square room, saying slowly to myself to keep me steady:

"Nancy, you're a college girl—just in from Bryn Mawr to meet your papa. Just see if your hat's on straight."

I did, going up to the big glass and looking beyond my excited face to the room behind me. There sat the woman who can never nurse her baby except where everybody can see her, in a railroad station. There was the woman who's always hungry, nibbling chocolates out of a box; and the woman fallen asleep, with her hat on the side, and hairpins dropping out of her hair; and the woman who's beside herself with fear that she'll miss her train; and the woman who is taking notes about the other women's rigs. And—

And I didn't like the look of that man with the cap who opened the swinging door a bit and peeped in. The women's waiting-room is no place for a man—nor for a girl who's got somebody else's watch inside her waist. Luckily, my back was toward him, but just as the door swung back he might have caught the reflection of my face in a mirror hanging opposite to the big one.

I retreated, going to an inner room where the ladies were having the maid brush their gowns, soiled from suburban travel and the dirty station.

The deuce is in it the way women stare. I took off my hat and jacket for a reason to stay there, and hung them up as leisurely as I could.

"Nance," I said under my breath, to the alert-eyed, pug-nosed girl in the mirror, who gave a quick glance about the room as I bent to wash my hands, "women stare 'cause they're women. There's no meaning in their look. If they were men, now, you might twitter."

I smoothed my hair and reached out my hand to get my hat and jacket when—when—

Oh, it was long; long enough to cover you from your chin to your heels! It was a dark, warm red, and it had a high collar of chinchilla that was fairly scrumptious. And just above it the hat hung, a red-cloth toque caught up on the side with some of the same fur.

The black maid misunderstood my involuntary gesture. I had all my best duds on, and when a lot of women stare it makes the woman they stare at peacock naturally, and—and—well, ask Tom what he thinks of my style when I'm on parade. At any rate, it was the maid's fault. She took down the coat and hat and held them for me as though they were mine. What could I do, 'cept just slip into the silk-lined beauty and set the toque on my head? The fool girl that owned them was having another maid mend a tear in her skirt, over in the corner; the little place was crowded. Anyway, I had both the coat and hat on and was out into the big anteroom in a jiffy.

What nearly wrecked me was the cut of that coat. It positively made me shiver with pleasure when I passed and saw myself in that long mirror. My, but I was great! The hang of that coat, the long, incurving sweep in the back, and the high fur collar up to one's nose—even if it is a turned-up nose—oh!

I stayed and looked a second too long, for just as I was pulling the flaring hat a bit over my face, the doors swung, as an old lady came in, and there behind her was that same curious man's face with the cap above it.

Trapped? Me? Not much! I didn't wait a minute, but threw the doors open with a gesture that might have belonged to the Queen of Spain. I almost ran into his arms. He gave an exclamation. I looked him straight in the eyes, as I hooked the collar close to my throat, and swept past him.

He weakened. That coat was too jolly much for him. It was for me, too. As I ran down the stairs, its influence so worked on me that I didn't know just which Vanderbilt I was.

I got out on the sidewalk all right, and was just about to take a car when the turnstile swung round, and there was that same man with the cap. His face was a funny mixture of doubt and determination. But it meant the Correction for me.

"Nance Olden, it's over," I said to myself.

But it wasn't. For it was then that I caught sight of the carriage. It was a fat, low, comfortable, elegant, sober carriage, wide and well-kept, with rubber-tired wheels. And the two heavy horses were fat and elegant and sober, too, and wide and well-kept. I didn't know it was the Bishop's then—I didn't care whose it was. It was empty, and it was mine. I'd rather go to the Correction—being too young to get to the place you're bound for, Tom Dorgan—in it than in the patrol wagon. At any rate, it was all the chance I had.

I slipped in, closing the door sharply behind me. The man on the box—he was wide and well-kept, too—was tired waiting, I suppose, for he continued to doze gently, his high coachman's collar up over his ears. I cursed that collar, which had prevented his hearing the door close, for then he might have driven off.

But it was great inside: soft and warm, the cushions of dark plum, the seat wide and roomy, a church paper, some notes for the Bishop's next sermon and a copy of Quo Vadis. I just snuggled down, trust me. I leaned far back and lay low. When I did peek out the window, I saw the man with the brass buttons and the cap turning to go inside again.

Victory! He had lost the scent. Who would look for Nancy Olden in the Bishop's carriage?

Now, you know how early I got up yesterday to catch the train so's Tom and I could come in with the people and be naturally mingling with them? And you remember the dance the night before? I hadn't had more than three hours' sleep, and the snug warmth of that coach was just nuts to me, after the freezing ride into town. I didn't dare get out for fear of some other man in a cap and buttons somewhere on the lookout. I knew they couldn't be on to my hiding-place or they'd have nabbed me before this. After a bit I didn't want to get out, I was so warm and comfortable—and elegant. O Tom, you should have seen your Nance in that coat and in the Bishop's carriage!

First thing I knew, I was dreaming you and I were being married, and you had brass buttons all over you, and I had the cloak all right, but it was a wedding-dress, and the chinchilla was a wormy sort of orange blossoms, and—and I waked when the handle of the door turned and the Bishop got in.

Asleep? That's what! I'd actually been asleep.

And what did I do now?

That's easy—fell asleep again. There wasn't anything else to do. Not really asleep this time, you know; just, just asleep enough to be wide awake to any chance there was in it.

The horses had started, and the carriage was half-way across the street before the Bishop noticed me.

He was a little Bishop, not big and fat and well-kept like the rig, but short and lean, with a little white beard and the softest eye—and the softest heart—and the softest head. Just listen.

"Lord bless me!" he exclaimed, hurriedly putting on his spectacles, and looking about bewildered.

I was slumbering sweetly in the corner, but I could see between my lashes that he thought he'd jumped into somebody else's carriage.

The sight of his book and his papers comforted him, though, and before he could make a resolution, I let the jolting of the carriage, as it crossed the car-track, throw me gently against him.

"Daddy," I murmured sleepily, letting my head rest on his little, prim shoulder.

That comforted him, too. Hush your laughing, Tom Dorgan; I mean calling him "daddy" seemed to kind of take the cuss off the situation.

"My child," he began very gently.

"Oh, daddy," I exclaimed, snuggling down close to him, "you kept me waiting so long I went to sleep. I thought you'd never come."

He put his arm about my shoulders in a fatherly way. You know, I found out later the Bishop never had had a daughter. I guess he thought he had one now. Such a simple, dear old soul! Just the same, Tom Dorgan, if he had been my father, I'd never be doing stunts with tipsy men's watches for you; nor if I'd had any father. Now, don't get mad. Think of the Bishop with his gentle, thin old arm about my shoulders, holding me for just a second as though I was his daughter! My, think of it! And me, Nance Olden, with that fat man's watch in my waist and some girl's beautiful long coat and hat on, all covered with chinchilla!

"There's some mistake, my little girl," he said, shaking me gently to wake me up, for I was going to sleep again, he feared.

"Oh, I knew you were kept at the office," I interrupted quickly. I preferred to be farther from the station with that girl's red coat before I got out. "We've missed our train, anyway, haven't we? After this, daddy dear, let's not take this route. If we'd go straight through on the one road, we wouldn't have this drive across town every time. I was wondering, before I fell asleep, what in the world I'd do in this big city if you didn't come."

He forgot to withdraw his arm, so occupied was he by my predicament.

"What would you do, my child, if you had—had missed your—your father?"

Wasn't it clumsy of him? He wanted to break it to me gently, and this was the best he could do.

"What would I do?" I gasped indignantly. "Why, daddy, imagine me alone, and—and without money! Why—why, how can you—"

"There! there!" he said, patting me soothingly on the shoulder.

That baby of a Bishop! The very thought of Nancy Olden out alone in the streets was too much for him.

He had put his free hand into his pocket and had just taken out a bill and was trying to plan a way to offer it to me and reveal the fact to poor, modest little Nance Olden that he was not her own daddy, when an awful thing happened.

We had got up street as far as the opera-house, when we were caught in the jam of carriages in front; the last afternoon opera of the season was just over. I was so busy thinking what would be my next move that I didn't notice much outside—and I didn't want to move, Tom, not a bit. Playing the Bishop's daughter in a trailing coat of red, trimmed with chinchilla, is just your Nancy's graft. But the dear little Bishop gave a jump that almost knocked the roof off the carriage, pulled his arm from behind me and dropped the ten-dollar bill he held as though it burned him. It fell in my lap. I jammed it into my coat pocket. Where is it now? Just you wait, Tom Dorgan, and you'll find out.

I followed the Bishop's eyes. His face was scarlet now. Right next to our carriage—mine and the Bishop's—there was another; not quite so fat and heavy and big, but smart, I tell you, with the silver harness jangling and the horses arching their backs under their blue-cloth jackets monogrammed in leather. All the same, I couldn't see anything to cause a loving father to let go his onliest daughter in such a hurry, till the old lady inside bent forward again and gave us another look.

Her face told it then. It was a big, smooth face, with accordion-plaited chins. Her hair was white and her nose was curved, and the pearls in her big ears brought out every ugly spot on her face. Her lips were thin, and her neck, hung with diamonds, looked like a bed with bolsters and pillows piled high, and her eyes—oh, Tom, her eyes! They were little and very gray, and they bored their way straight through the windows—hers and ours—and hit the Bishop plumb in the face.

My, if I could only have laughed! The Bishop, the dear, prim little Bishop in his own carriage, with his arm about a young woman in red and chinchilla, offering her a bank-note, and Mrs. Dowager Diamonds, her eyes popping out of her head at the sight, and she one of the lady pillars of his church—oh, Tom! it took all of this to make that poor innocent next to me realize how he looked in her eyes.

But you see it was over in a minute. The carriage wheels were unlocked, and the blue coupe went whirling away, and we in the plum-cushioned carriage followed slowly.

I decided that I'd had enough. Now and here in the middle of all these carriages was a bully good time and place for me to get away. I turned to the Bishop. He was blushing like a boy. I blushed, too. Yes, I did, Tom Dorgan, but it was because I was bursting with laughter.

"Oh, dear!" I exclaimed in sudden dismay. "You're not my father."

"No—no, my dear, I—I'm not," he stammered, his face purple now with embarrassment. "I was just trying to tell you, you poor little girl, of your mistake and planning a way to help you, when—"

He made a gesture of despair toward the side where the coupe had been.

I covered my face with my hands, and shrinking over into the corner, I cried:

"Let me out! let me out! You're not my father. Oh, let me out!"

"Why, certainly, child. But I'm old enough, surely, to be, and I wish—I wish I were."

"You do!"

The dignity and tenderness and courtesy in his voice sort of sobered me. But all at once I remembered the face of Mrs. Dowager Diamonds, and I understood.

"Oh, because of her," I said, smiling and pointing to the side where the coupe had been.

My, but it was a rotten bad move! I ought to have been strapped for it. Oh, Tom, Tom, it takes more'n a red coat with chinchilla to make a black-hearted thing like me into the girl he thought I was.

He stiffened and sat up like a prim little school-boy, his soft eyes hurt like a dog's that's been wounded.

I won't tell you what I did then. No, I won't. And you won't understand, but just that minute I cared more for what he thought of me than whether I got to the Correction or anywhere else.

It made us friends in a minute, and when he stopped the carriage to let me out, my hand was still in his. But I wouldn't go. I'd made up my mind to see him out of his part of the scrape, and first thing you know we were driving up toward the Square, if you please, to Mrs. Dowager Diamonds' house.

He thought it was his scheme, the poor lamb, to put me in her charge till my lost daddy could send for me. He'd no more idea that I was steering him toward her, that he was doing the only thing possible, the only square thing by his reputation, than he had that Nance Olden had been raised by the Cruelty, and then flung herself away on the first handsome Irish boy she met.

That'll do, Tom.

Girls, if you could have seen Mrs. Dowager Diamonds' face when she came down the stairs, the Bishop's card in her hand, and into the gorgeous parlor, it'd have been as good as a front seat at the show.

She was mad, and she was curious, and she was amazed, and she was disarmed; for the very nerve of his bringing me to her staggered her so that she could hardly believe she'd seen what she had.

"My dear Mrs. Ramsay," he began, confused a bit by his remembrance of how her face had looked fifteen minutes before, "I bring to you an unfortunate child, who mistook my carriage for her father's this afternoon at the station. She is a college girl, a stranger in town, and till her father claims her—"

Oh, the baby! the baby! She was stiffening like a rod before his very eyes. How did his words explain his having his arm round the unfortunate child? His conscience was so clean that the dear little man actually overlooked the fact that it wasn't my presence in the carriage, but his conduct there that had excited Mrs. Dowager Diamonds.

And didn't the story sound thin? I tell you, Tom, when it comes to lying to a woman you've got to think up something stronger than it takes to make a man believe in you—if you happen to be female yourself.

I didn't wait for him to finish, but waltzed right in. I danced straight up to that side of beef with the diamonds still on it, and flinging my arms about her, turned a coy eye on the Bishop.

"You said your wife was out of town, daddy," I cried gaily. "Have you got another wife besides mummy?"

The poor Bishop! Do you think he tumbled? Not a bit—not a bit. He sat there gasping like a fish, and Mrs. Dowager Diamonds, surprised by my sudden attack, stood bolt upright, about as pleasant to hug as—as you are, Tom, when you're jealous.

The trouble with the Bishop's set is that it's deadly slow. Now, if I had really been the Bishop's daughter—all right, I'll go on.

"Oh, mummy," I went on quickly. You know how I said it, Tom—the way I told you after that last row that Dan Christensen wasn't near so good-looking as you—remember? "Oh, mummy, you don't know how good it feels to get home. Out there at that awful college, studying and studying and studying, sometimes I thought I'd lose my senses. There's a girl out there now suffering from nervous prostration. She worked so hard preparing for the mid-years. What's her name? I can't think—I can't think, my head's so tired. But it sounds like mine, a lot like mine. Once—I think it was yesterday—I thought it was mine, and I made up my mind suddenly to come right home and bring it with me. But it can't be mine, can it? It can't be my name she's got. It can't be, mummy, say it can't, say it can't!"

Tom, I ought to have gone on the stage. I'll go yet, when you're sent up some day. Yes, I will. You'll be where you can't stop me.

I couldn't see the Bishop, but the Dowager—oh, I'd got her. Not so bad an old body, either, if you only take her the right way. First, she was suspicious, and then she was scared. And then, bit by bit, the stiffness melted out of her, her arms came up about me, and there I was, lying all comfy, with the diamonds on her neck boring rosettes in my cheeks, and she a-sniffling over me and patting me and telling me not to get excited, that it was all right, and now I was home mummy would take care of me, she would, that she would.

She did. She got me on to a lounge, soft as—as marshmallows, and she piled one silk pillow after another behind my back.

"Come, dear, let me help you off with your coat," she cooed, bending over me.

"Oh, mummy, it's so cold! Can't I please keep it on?"

To let that coat off me was to give the whole thing away. My rig underneath, though good enough for your girl, Tom, on a holiday, wasn't just what they wear in the Square. And, d'ye know, you'll say it's silly, but I had a conviction that with that coat I should say good-by to the nerve I'd had since I got into the Bishop's carriage,—and from there into society. I let her take the hat, though, and I could see by the way she handled it that it was all right—the thing; her kind, you know. Oh, the girl I got it from had good taste, all right.

I closed my eyes for a moment as I lay there and she stood stroking my hair. She must have thought I'd fallen asleep, for she turned to the Bishop, and holding out her hand, she said softly:

"My dear, dear Bishop, you are the best-hearted, the saintliest man on earth. Because you are so beautifully clean-souled yourself, you must pardon me. I am ashamed to say it, but I shall have no rest till I do. When I saw you in the carriage downtown, with that poor, demented child, I thought, for just a moment—oh, can you forgive me? It shows what an evil mind I have. But you, who know so well what Edward is, what my life has been with him, will see how much reason I have to be suspicious of all men!"

I shook, I laughed so hard. What a corker her Edward must be! See, Tom, poor old Mrs. Dowager up in the Square having the same devil's luck with her man as Molly Elliott down in the Alley has with hers. I wonder if you're all alike. No, for there's the Bishop. He had taken her hand sympathizingly, forgivingly, but his silence made me curious. I knew he wouldn't let the old lady believe for a moment I was luny, if once he could be sure himself that I wasn't. You lie, Tom Dorgan, he wouldn't! Well—But the poor baby, how could he expect to see through a game that had caught the Dowager herself? Still, I could hear him walking softly toward me, and I felt him looking keenly down at me long before I opened my eyes.

When I did, you should have seen him jump. Guilty he felt. I could see the blood rush up under his clear, thin old skin, soft as a baby's, to find himself caught trying to spy out my secret.

I just looked, big-eyed, up at him. You know; the way Molly's kid does, when he wakes. I looked a long, long time, as though I was puzzled.

"Daddy," I said slowly, sitting up. "You—you are my daddy, ain't you?"

"Yes—yes, of course." It was the Dowager who got between him and me, hinting heavily at him with nods and frowns. But the dear old fellow only got pinker in the effort to look a lie and not say it. Still, he looked relieved. Evidently he thought I was luny all right, but that I had lucid intervals. I heard him whisper something like this to the Dowager just before the maid came in with tea for me.

Yes, Tom Dorgan, tea for Nancy Olden off a silver salver, out of a cup like a painted eggshell. My, but that almost floored me! I was afraid I'd give myself dead away with all those little jars and jugs. So I said I wasn't hungry, though, Lord knows, I hadn't had anything to eat since early morning. But the Dowager sent the maid away and took the tray herself, operating all the jugs and pots for me, and then tried to feed me the tea. She was about as handy as Molly's little sister is with the baby—but I allowed myself to be coaxed, and drank it down.

Tea, Tom Dorgan. Ever taste tea? If you knew how to behave yourself in polite society, I'd give you a card to my friend, the Dowager, up in the Square.

How to get away! That was the thing that worried me. I'd just made up my mind to have a lucid interval, when cr-creak, the front door opened, and in walked—

Tom, you're mighty cute—so cute you'll land us both behind bars some day—but you can't guess who came in on our little family party. Yes—oh, yes, you've met him.

Well, the old duffer whose watch was ticking inside my waist that very minute! Yes, sir, the same red-faced, big-necked fellow we'd spied getting full at the little station in the country. Only, he was a bit mellower than when you grabbed his chain. Well, he was Edward.

I almost dropped the cup when I saw him. The Dowager took it from me, saying:

"There, dear, don't be nervous. It's only—only—"

She got lost. It couldn't be my daddy—the Bishop was that. But it was her husband, so who could it be?

"Evening, Bishop. Hello, Henrietta, back so soon from the opera?" roared Edward, in a big, husky voice. He'd had more since we saw him, but he walked straight as the Bishop himself, and he's a dear little ramrod. "Ah!"—his eyes lit up at sight of me—"ah, Miss—Miss—of course, I've met the young lady, Henrietta, but hang me if I haven't forgotten her name."

"Miss—Miss Murieson," lied the old lady, glibly. "A—a relative."

"Why, mummy!" I said reproachfully.

"There—there. It's only a joke. Isn't it a joke, Edward?" she demanded, laughing uneasily.

"Joke?" he repeated with a hearty bellow of laughter. "Best kind of a joke, I call it, to find so pretty a girl right in your own house, eh, Bishop?"

"Why does he call my father 'Bishop', mummy?"

I couldn't help it. The fun of hearing the Dowager lie and knowing the Bishop beside himself with the pain of deception was too much for me. I could see she didn't dare trust her Edward with my sad story.

"Ho! ho! The Bishop—that's good. No, my dear Miss Murieson, if this lady's your mother, why, I must be—at least, I ought to be, your father. As such, I'm going to have all the privileges of a parent—bless me, if I'm not."

I don't suppose he'd have done it if he'd been sober, but there's no telling, when you remember the reputation the Dowager had given him. But he'd got no further than to put his arm around me when both the Bishop and the Dowager flew to the rescue. My, but they were shocked! I couldn't help wondering what they'd have done if Edward had happened to see the Bishop in the same sort of tableau earlier in the afternoon.

But I got a lucid interval just then, and distracted their attention. I stood for a moment, my head bent as though I was thinking deeply.

"I think I'll go now," I said at length. "I—I don't understand exactly how I got here," I went on, looking from the Bishop to the Dowager and back again, "or how I happened to miss my father. I'm ever—so much obliged to you, and if you will give me my hat, I'll take the next train back to college."

"You'll do nothing of the sort," said the Dowager, promptly. "My dear, you're a sweet girl that's been studying too hard. You must go to my room and rest—"

"And stay for dinner. Don't you care. Sometimes I don't know how I get here myself." Edward winked jovially.

Well, I did. While the Dowager's back was turned, I gave him the littlest one, in return for his. It made him drunker than ever.

"I think," said the Bishop, grimly, with a significant glance at the Dowager, as he turned just then and saw the old cock ogling me, "the young lady is wiser than we. I'll take her to the station—"

The station! Ugh! Not Nance Olden, with the red coat still on.

"Impossible, my dear Bishop," interrupted the Dowager. "She can't be permitted to go back on the train alone."

"Why, Miss—Miss Murieson, I'll see you back all the way to the college door. Not at all, not at all. Charmed. First, we'll have dinner—or, first I'll telephone out there and tell 'em you're with us, so that if there's any rule or anything of that sort—"

The telephone! This wretched Edward with half his wits gave me more trouble than the Bishop and the Dowager put together. She jumped at the idea, and left the room, only to come back again to whisper to me:

"What name, my dear?"

"What name? what name?" I repeated blankly. What name, indeed. I wonder how "Nance Olden" would have done.

"Don't hurry, dear, don't perplex yourself," she whispered anxiously, noting my bewilderment. "There's plenty of time, and it makes no difference—not a particle, really."

I put my hand to my head.

"I can't think—I can't think. There's one girl has nervous prostration, and her name's got mixed with mine, and I can't—"

"Hush, hush! Never mind. You shall come and lie down in my room. You'll stay with us to-night, anyway, and we'll have a doctor in, Bishop."

"That's right," assented the Bishop. "I'll go get him myself."

"You—you're not going!" I cried in dismay. It was real. I hated to see him go.

"Nonsense—'phone." It was Edward who went himself to telephone for the doctor, and I saw my time getting short.

But the Bishop had to go, anyway. He looked out at his horses shivering in front of the house, and the sight hurried him.

"My child," he said, taking my hand, "just let Mrs. Ramsay take care of you to-night. Don't bother about anything, but just rest. I'll see you in the morning," he went on, noticing that I kind of clung to him. Well, I did. "Can't you remember what I said to you in the carriage—that I wished you were my daughter. I wish you were, indeed I do, and that I could take you home with me and keep you, child."

"Then—to-night—if—when you pray—will you pray for me as if I was—your own daughter?"

Tom Dorgan, you think no prayers but a priest's are any good, you bigoted, snickering Catholic! I tell you if some day I cut loose from you and start in over again, it'll be the Bishop's prayers that'll do it.

The Dowager and I passed Edward in the ball. He gave me a look behind her back, and I gave him one to match it. Just practice, you know, Tom. A girl can never know when she'll want to be expert in these things.

She made me lie down on a couch while she turned the lamp low, and then left me alone in a big palace of a bedroom filled with things. And I wanted everything I saw. If I could, I'd have lifted everything in sight.

But every minute brought that doctor nearer. Soon as I could be really sure she was gone, I got up, and, hurrying to the long French windows that opened on the great stone piazza, I unfastened them quietly, and inch by inch I pushed them open.

There within ten feet of me stood Edward. No escape that way. He saw me, and was tiptoeing heavily toward me, when I heard the door click behind me, and in walked the Dowager back again.

I flew to her.

"I thought I heard some one out there," I said.

"It frightened me so that I got up to look. Nobody could be out there, could they?"

She walked to the window and put her head out. Her lips tightened grimly.

"No, nobody could be out there," she said, breathing hard, "but you might get nervous just thinking there might be. We'll go to a room upstairs."

And go we did, in spite of all I could plead about feeling well enough now to go alone and all the rest of it. How was I to get out of a second or third-story window?

I began to think about the Correction again as I followed her upstairs, and after she'd left me I just sat waiting for the doctor to come and send me there. I didn't much care, till I remembered the Bishop. I could almost see his face as it would look when he'd be called to testify against me, and I'd be standing in that railed-in prisoner's pen, in the middle of the court-room, where Dan Christensen stood when they tried him.

No, I couldn't bear that; not without a fight, anyway. It was for the Bishop I'd got into this part of the scrape. I'd get out of it so's he shouldn't know how bad a thing a girl can be.

While I lay thinking it over, the same maid that had brought me the tea came in. She was an ugly, thin little thing. If she's a sample of the maids in that house, the lot of them would take the kink out of your pretty hair, Thomas J. Dorgan, Esquire, late of the House of Refuge and soon of Moyamensing. Don't throw things. People in my set, mine and the Dowager's, don't.

She had been sent to help me undress, she said, and make me comfortable. The doctor lived just around the corner and would be in in a minute.

Phew! She wasn't very promising, but she was my only chance. I took her.

"I really don't need any help, thank you, Nora," I said, chipper as a sparrow, and remembering the name the Dowager had called her by. "Aunt Henrietta is too fussy, don't you think? Oh, of course, you won't say a word against her. She told me the other day that she'd never had a maid so sensible and quick-witted, too, as her Nora. Do you know, I've a mind to play a joke on the doctor when he comes. You'll help me, won't you? Oh, I know you will!" Suddenly I remembered the Bishop's bill. I took it out of my pocket. Yep, Tom, that's where it went. I had to choose between giving that skinny maid the biggest tip she ever got in her life—or Nance Olden to the Correction.

You needn't swear, Tom Dorgan. I fancy if I'd got there, you'd got worse. No, you bully, you know I wouldn't tell; but the police sort of know how to pair our kind.

In her cap and apron, I let the doctor in and myself out. And I don't regret a thing up there in the Square except that lovely red coat with the high collar and the hat with the fur on it. I'd give—Tom, get me a coat like that and I'll marry you for life.

No, there's one thing I could do better if it was to be done over again. I could make that dear little old Bishop wish harder I'd been his daughter.

What am I mooning about? Oh—nothing. There's the watch—Edward's watch. Take it.

II.

Yes, empty-handed, Tom Dorgan. And I can't honestly say I didn't have the chance, but—if my hands are empty my head is full.

Listen.

There's a girl I know with short brown hair, a turned-up nose and gray eyes, rather far apart. You know her, too? Well, she can't help that.

But this girl—oh, she makes such a pretty boy! And the ladies at the hotel over in Brooklyn, they just dote on her when she's not only a boy but a bell-boy. Her name may be Nancy when she's in petticoats, but in trousers she's Nathaniel—in short, Nat.

Now, Nat, in blue and buttons, with his nails kept better than most boys', with his curly hair parted in the middle, and with a gentle tang to his voice that makes him almost girlish—who would suspect Nat of having a stolen pass-key in his pocket and a pretty fair knowledge of the contents of almost every top bureau-drawer in the hotel?

Not Mrs. Sarah Kingdon, a widow just arrived from Philadelphia, and desperately gone on young Mr. George Moriway, also fresh from Philadelphia, and desperately gone on Mrs. Kingdon's money.

The tips that lady gave the bad boy Nat! I knew I couldn't make you believe it any other way; that's why I passed 'em on to you, Tommy-boy.

The hotel woman, you know, girls, is a hotel woman because she isn't fit to be anything else. She's lazy and selfish and little, and she's shifted all her legitimate cares on to the proprietor's shoulders. She actually—you can understand and share my indignation, can't you, Tom, as you've shared other things?—she even gives over her black tin box full of valuables to the hotel clerk to put in the safe; the coward! But her vanity—ah, there's where we get her, such speculators as you and myself. She's got to outshine the woman who sits at the next table, and so she borrows her diamonds from the clerk, wears 'em like the peacock she is, and trembles till they're back in the safe again.

In the meantime she locks them up in the tin box which she puts in her top bureau-drawer, hides the key, forgets where she hid it, and—O Tom! after searching for it for hours and making herself sick with anxiety, she ties up her head in a wet handkerchief with vinegar on it and—rings the bell for the bell-boy!

He comes.

As I said, he's a prompt, gentle little bell-boy, slight, looks rather young for his job, but that very youth and innocence of his make him such a fellow to trust!

"Nat," says Mrs. Kingdon, tearfully pressing half a dollar into the nice lad's hand, "I—I've lost something and I want you to—to help me find it."

"Yes'm," says Nat. He's the soul of politeness.

"It must be here—it must be in this room," says the lady, getting wild with the terror of losing. "I'm sure—positive—that I went straight to the shoe-bag and slipped it in there. And now I can't find it, and I must have it before I go out this afternoon for—for a very special reason. My daughter Evelyn will be home to-morrow and—why don't you look for it?"

"What is it, ma'am?"

"I told you once. My key—a little flat key that locks—a box I've got," she finishes distrustfully.

"Have you looked in the shoe-bag, ma'am?"

"Why, of course I have, you little stupid. I want you to hunt other places where I can't easily get. There are other places I might have put it, but I'm positive it was in the shoe-bag."

Well, I looked for that key. Where? Where not? I looked under the rubbish in the waste-paper basket; Mrs. Kingdon often fooled thieves by dropping it there. I pulled up the corner of the carpet and looked there—it was loose; it had often been used for a hiding-place. I looked in Miss Evelyn's boot and in her ribbon box. I emptied Mrs. Kingdon's full powder box. I climbed ladders and felt along cornices. I looked through the pockets of Mrs. Kingdon's gowns—a clever bell-boy it takes to find a woman's pocket, but even the real masculine ones among 'em are half feminine; they've had so much to do with women.

I rummaged through her writing-desk, and, in searching a gold-cornered pad, found a note from Moriway hidden under the corner. I hid it again carefully—in my coat pocket. A love-letter from Moriway, to a woman twenty years older than himself—'tain't a bad lay, Tom Dorgan, but you needn't try it.

At first she watched every move I made, but later, as her headache grew worse, she got desperate. So then I put my hand down into the shoe-bag and found the key, where it had slipped under a fold of cloth.

Do you suppose that woman was grateful? She snatched it from me.

"I knew it was there. I told you it was there. If you'd had any sense you'd have looked there first. The boys in this hotel are so stupid."

"That's all, ma'am?"

She nodded. She was fitting the key into the black box she'd taken from the top drawer. Nat had got to the outside door when he heard her come shrieking after him.

"Nat—Nat—come back! My diamonds—they're not here. I know I put them back last night—I'm positive. I could swear to it. I can see myself putting them in the chamois bag, and—O my God, where can they be! This time they're gone!"

Nat could have told her—but what's the use? He felt she'd only lose 'em again if she had 'em. So he let them lie snug in his trousers pocket—where he had put the chamois bag, when his eyes lit on it, under the corner of the carpet. He might have passed it over to her then, but you see, Tom, she hadn't told him to look for a bag; it was a key she wanted. Bell-boys are so stupid.

This time she followed his every step. He could not put his hand on the smallest thing without rousing her suspicion. If he hesitated, she scolded. If he hurried, she fumed. Most unjust, I call it, because he had no thought of stealing—just then.

"Come," she said at last, "we'll go down and report it at the desk."

"Hadn't I better wait here, ma'am, and look again?"

She looked sharply at him.

"No; you'd better do just as I tell you."

So down we went. And we met Mr. Moriway there. She'd telephoned him. The chambermaid was called, the housekeeper, the electrical engineer who'd been fixing bells that morning, and, as I said, a bell-boy named Nat, who told how he'd just come on duty when Mrs. Kingdon's bell rang, found her key and returned it to her, and was out of the room when she unlocked the box. That was all he knew.

"Is he telling the truth?" Moriway asked Mrs Kingdon.

"Ye—es, I guess he is; but where are the diamonds? We must have them—you know—to-day, George," she whispered. And then she turned and went upstairs, leaving Moriway to do the rest.

"There's only one thing to do, Major," he said to the proprietor. "Search 'em all and then—"

"Search me? It's an outrage!" cried the housekeeper.

"Search me if ye loike," growled McCarthy, resentfully. "Oi wasn't there but a minute; the lady herself can tell ye that."

Katie, the chambermaid, flushed painfully, and there were indignant tears in her eyes, which, I'll tell you in confidence, made a girl named Nancy uncomfortable.

But the boy Nat; knowing that bell-boys have no rights, said nothing. But he thought. He thought, Tom Dorgan, a lot of things and a long way ahead.

The peppery old Major marched us all off to his private office.

Not much, girls, it hadn't come. For suddenly the annunciator rang out.

Out of the corner of his eye, Nat looked at the bell-boy's bench. It was empty. There was to be a ball that night, and the bells were going it over all the place.

"Number Twenty-one!" shouted the clerk at the desk.

But Number Twenty-one didn't budge. His heart was beating like a hammer, and the ting—ng—ng of that bell calling him rang in his head like a song.

"Number Twenty-one!" yelled the clerk.

Oh, he's got a devil of a temper, has that clerk. Some day, Tom, when you love me very much, go up to the hotel and break his face for me.

"You.—boy—confound you, can't you hear?" he shouted.

That time he caught the Major's ear—the one that wasn't deaf. He looked from Powers' black face to the bench and then to me. And all the time the bell kept ringing like mad.

"Git!" he said to the boy. "And come back in a hurry."

Number Twenty-one got—but leisurely. It wouldn't do for a bell-boy to hurry, particularly when he had such good cause.

Oh, girls, those stone stairs, the servants' stairs at the St. James! They're fierce. I tell you, Mag, scrubbing the floors at the Cruelty ain't so bad. But this time I was jolly glad bell-boys weren't allowed in the elevator. For there were those diamonds in my pants pocket, and I must get rid of 'em before I got down to the office again. So I climbed those stairs, and every step I took my eye was searching for a hiding-place. I could have pitched the little bag out of a window, but Nancy Olden wasn't throwing diamonds to the birds, any more than Mag here is likely to cut off the braids of red hair we used to play horse with when we drove her about the Cruelty yard.

One flight.

No chance.

Another.

Everything bare as stone and soap could keep it.

The third flight—my knees began to tremble, and not with climbing. The call came from this floor. But I ran up a fourth just on the chance, and there in a corner was a fire hatchet strapped to the wall. Behind that hatchet Mrs. Kingdon's diamonds might lie snug till evening. I put the ends of my fingers first in the little crack to make sure the little bag wouldn't drop to the floor, and then dived into my pocket and—

And there behind me, stealthily coming up the last turn of the stairs was Mr. George Moriway!

Don't you hate a soft-walking man, Mag? That cute fellow was cuter than the old Major himself, and had followed me every inch of the way.

"There's something loose with this hatchet, sir," I said, innocently looking down at him.

"Oh, there is? What an observing little fellow you are! Never mind the hatchet; just tell me what number you were sent to answer."

"Number?" I repeated, as though I couldn't see why he wanted to know. "Why—431."

"Not much, my boy—331."

"'Scuse me, sir, ain't you mistaken?"

He looked at me for full a minute. I stared him straight in the eye. A nasty eye he's got—black and bloodshot and cold and full of suspicion. But it wavered a bit at the end.

"I may be," he said slowly, "but not about the number. Just you turn around and get down to 331."

"All right, sir. Thank you very much. It might have got me in trouble. The ladies are so particular about having the bells answered quick—"

"I guess you'll get in trouble all right," he said and stood watching—from where he stood he could watch me every inch of the way—till I got to 331, at the end of the hall, Mrs. Kingdon's door.

And the goods still on me, Tom, mind that.

My, but Mrs. Kingdon was wrathy when she saw me!

"Why did they send you?" she cried. "Why did you keep me waiting so long? I want a chambermaid. I've rung a dozen times. The whole place is crazy about that old ball to-night, and no one can get decent attention."

"Can't I do what you want, ma'am?" I just yearned to get inside that door.

"No," she snapped. "I don't want a boy to fasten my dress in the back—"

"We often do, ma'am," I said softly.

"You do? Well—"

"Yes'm." I breathed again.

"Well—it's indecent. Go down and send me a maid."

She was just closing the door in my face—and Moriway waiting for me to watch me down again.

"Mrs. Kingdon—"

"Well, what do you want?"

"I want to tell you that when I get down to the office they'll search me."

She looked at me amazed.

"And—and there's something in my pocket I—you wouldn't like them to find."

"What in the world—my diamonds! You did take them, you little wretch?"

She caught hold of my coat. But Lordy! I didn't want to get away a little bit. I let her pull me in, and then I backed up against the door and shut it.

"Diamonds! Oh, no, ma'am. I hope I'm not a thief. But—but it was something you dropped—this."

I fished Moriway's letter out of my pocket and handed it to her.

The poor old lady! Being a bell-boy you know just how old ladies really are. This one at evening, after her face had been massaged for an hour, and the manicure girl and the hair-dresser had gone, wasn't so bad. But to-day, with the marks of the morning's tears on her agitated face, with the blood pounding up to her temples where the hair was thin and gray—Tom Dorgan, if I'm a vain old fool like that when I'm three times as old as I am, just tie a stone around my neck and take me down and drop me into the nearest water, won't you?

"You abominable little wretch!" she sobbed. "I suppose you've told everybody in the office."

"How could I, ma'am?"

"How could you?" She looked up, the tears on her flabby, flushed cheek.

"I didn't know myself. I can't read writing—"

It was thin, but she wanted to believe it.

She could have taken me in her arms, she was so happy.

"There! there!" she patted my shoulder and gave me a dollar bill. "I was a bit hasty, Nat. It's only a—a little business matter that Mr. Moriway's attending to for me. We—we'll finish it up this afternoon. I shouldn't like Miss Kingdon to know of it, because—because I—never like to worry her about business, you know. So don't mention it when she comes to-morrow."

"No'm. Shall I fasten your dress?" I simply had to stay in that room till I could get rid of those diamonds.

With a faded old blush—the nicest thing about her I'd ever seen—she turned her back.

"It's dark to-day, ma'am," I coaxed. "Would you mind coming nearer the window?"

No, she wouldn't mind. She backed up to the corner like a gentle little lamb. While I hooked with one hand, I dropped the little bag where the carpet was still turned up, and with the toe of my shoe spread it flat again.

"You're real handy for a boy," she said, pleased.

"Thank you, ma'am," I answered, pleased myself.

Moriway was still watching me, of course, when I came out, but I ran downstairs, he following close, and when the Major got hold of me, I pulled my pockets inside out like a little man.

Moriway was there at the time. I knew he wasn't convinced. But he couldn't watch a bell-boy all day long, and the moment I was sure his eyes were off me I was ready to get those diamonds back again.

But not a call came all that afternoon from the west side of the house, except the call of those pretty, precious things snug under the carpet calling, calling to me to come and get them and drop bell-boying for good.

At last I couldn't stand it any longer. There's only one thing to do when your chance won't come to you; that is, to go to it. At about four o'clock I lit out, climbed to the second story and there—Mag, I always was the luckiest girl at the Cruelty, wasn't I? Well, there was suite 231 all torn up, plumbers and painters in there, and nothing in the world to prevent a boy's skinning through when no one was watching, out of the window and up the fire-escape.

Just outside of Mrs. Kingdon's window I lay still a minute. I had seen her and Moriway go out together—she all gay with finery, he carrying her bag. The lace curtains in 331 were blowing in the breeze. Cautiously I parted them and looked in. Everything was lovely. From where I lay I reached down and turned back the flap of the carpet. It was too easy. Those darling diamonds seemed just to leap up into my hand. In a moment I had them tucked away in my pants pocket. Then down the fire-escape and out through 231, where I told the painter I'd been to get a toy the boy in 441 had dropped out of the window.

But he paid no attention to me. No one did, though I felt those diamonds shining like an X-ray through my very body. I got downstairs and was actually outside the door, almost in the street and off to you, when a girl called me.

"Here, boy, carry this case," she said.

Do you know who it was? Oh, yes, you do, a dear old friend of mine from Philadelphia, a young lady whose taste—well, all right, I'll tell you: it was the girl with the red coat, and the hat with the chinchilla fur.

How did they look? Oh, fairly well on a blonde! But to my taste the last girl I'd seen in the coat and hat was handsomer.

Well, I carried her suit-case and followed her back into the hotel. I didn't want to a bit, though that coat still—wonder how she got it back!

She sailed up the hall and into the elevator, and I had to follow. We got of at the third story, and she brought me right to the door of 331. And then I knew this must be Evelyn.

"Mrs. Kingdon's out, Miss. She didn't expect you till to-morrow."

"Did she tell you that? Too bad she isn't at home! She said she'd be kept busy all day to-day with a business matter, and that I'd better not get here till to-morrow. But I—"

"Wanted to get here in time for the wedding?" I suggested softly.

You should have seen her jump.

"Wedding! Not—"

"Mrs. Kingdon and Mr. Moriway."

She turned white.

"Has that man followed her here? Quick, tell me. Has she actually married him?"

"No—not yet. It's for five o'clock at the church on the corner."

"How do you know?" She turned on me, suddenly suspicious.

"Well—I do know. And I'm the only person in the house that does."

"I don't believe you."

She took out her key and opened the door, and I followed her in with the suit-case. But before I could get it set down on the floor, she had swooped on a letter that was lying in the middle of the table, had torn it open, and then with a cry had come whirling toward me.

"Where is this church? Come, help me to get to it before five and I'll—oh, you shall have anything in the world you want!"

She flew out into the hall, I after her. And first thing you know we were down in the street, around the corner, and there in front of the church was a carriage with Moriway just helping Mrs. Kingdon out.

"Mother!"

At that cry the old lady's knees seemed to crumble under her. Her poor old painted face looked out ghastly and ashamed from her wedding finery. But Evelyn in her red coat flew to her and took her in her arms as though she was a child. And like a child, Mrs. Kingdon sobbed and made excuses and begged to be forgiven.

I looked at Moriway. It was all the pay I wanted—particularly as I had those little diamonds.

"You're just in time, Miss Kingdon," he said uneasily, "to make your mother happy by your presence at her wedding."

"I'm just in time, Mr. Moriway, to see that my mother's not made unhappy by your presence."

"Evelyn!" Mrs. Kingdon remonstrated.

"Come, Sarah." Moriway offered his arm.

The bride shook her head.

"To-morrow," she said feebly.

Moriway breathed a swear.

Miss Kingdon laughed.

"I've come to take care of you, you silly little mother, dear.... It won't be to-morrow, Mr. Moriway."

"No—not to-morrow—next week," sighed Mrs. Kingdon.

"In fact, mother's changed her mind, Mr. Moriway. She thinks it ungenerous to accept such a sacrifice from a man who might be her son—don't you, mother?"

"Well, perhaps, George—" She looked up from her daughter's shoulder—she was crying all over that precious red coat of mine—and her eyes lit on me. "Oh—you wicked boy, you told a lie!" she gasped. "You did read my letter."

I laughed; laughed out loud, it was such a bully thing to watch Moriway's face.

But that was an unlucky laugh of mine; it turned his wrath on me. He made a dive toward me. I ducked and ran. Oh, how I ran! But if he hadn't slipped on the curb he'd have had me. As he fell, though, he let out a yell.

"Stop thief! stop thief! Thief! Thief! Thief!"

May you never hear it, Mag, behind you when you've somebody else's diamonds in your pocket. It sounds—it sounds the way the bay of the hounds must sound to the hare. It seems to fly along with the air; at the same time to be behind you, at your side, even in front of you.

I heard it bellowed in a dozen different voices, and every now and then I could hear Moriway as I pelted on—that brassy, cruel bellow of his that made my heart sick.

And then all at once I heard a policeman's whistle.

That whistle was like a signal—I saw the gates of the Correction open before me. I saw your Nance, Tom, in a neat striped dress, and she was behind bars—bars—bars! There were bars everywhere before me. In fact, I felt them against my very hands, for in my mad race I had shot up a blind alley—a street that ended in a garden behind an iron fence.

I grabbed the diamonds to throw them from me, but I couldn't—I just couldn't! I jumped the fence where the gate was low, and with that whistle flying shrill and shriller after me I ran to the house.

I might have jumped from the frying-pan? Of course, I might. But it was all fire to me. To be caught at the end is at least no worse than to be caught at the beginning. Anyhow, it was my one chance, and I took it as unhesitatingly as a rat takes a leap into a trap to escape a terrier. Only—only, it was my luck that the trap wasn't set! The room was empty. I pushed open a glass door, and fell over an open trunk that stood beside it.

It bruised my knee and tore my hand, but oh!—it was nuts to me. For it was a woman's trunk filled with women's things.

A skirt! A blessed skirt! And not a striped one. I threw off the bell-boy's jacket and I got into that dear dress so quick it made my head swim.

The jacket was a bit tight but I didn't button it, and I'd just got a stiff little hat perched on my head when I heard the tramp of men on the sidewalk, and in the dusk saw the cop's buttons at the gate.

Caught? Not much. Not yet. I threw open the glass doors and walked out into the garden.

"Miss—Omar—I wonder if it would be Miss Omar?"

You bet I didn't take time to see who it was talking before I answered. Of course I was Miss Omar. I was Miss Anybody that had a right to wear skirts and be inside those blessed gates.

"Ah—h! I fancied you might be. I've been expecting you."

It was a lazy, low voice with a laugh in it, and it came from a wheeled chair, where a young man lay. Sallow he was and slim and long, and helpless—you could see that by his white hanging hands. But his voice—it was what a woman's voice would be if she were a man. It made you perk up and pretend to be somewhere near its level. It fitted his soft, black clothes and his fine, clean face. It meant silks and velvets and—

Oh, all right, Tommy Dorgan, if you're going to get jealous of a voice!

"Excuse me, Mr. Latimer." The cop came in as he spoke, Moriway following; the rest of the hounds hung about. "There's a thieving bell-boy from the hotel that's somewhere in your grounds. Can I come in and get him?"

"In here, Sergeant? Aren't you mistaken?"

"No; Mr. Moriway here saw him jump the gate not five minutes since."

"Strange, and I here all the time! I may have dozed of, though. Certainly—certainly. Look for the little rascal. What's he stolen? Diamonds! Tut! tut! Enterprising, isn't he? ... Miss Omar, won't you kindly reach the bell yonder—no, on the table; that's it—and ring for some one to take the officer about?"

I rang.

Do you know what happened? An electric light strung on the tree above the table shone out, and there I stood under it with Moriway's eyes full upon me.

"Great—!" he began.

"Just ring again—" Mr. Latimer's voice came soft as silk.

My fingers trembled so, the bell clattered out of them and fell jangling to the ground. But it rang. And the light above me went out like magic. I fell back into a garden chair.

"I beg your pardon, Mr.—was Moriway the name?—I must have interrupted you, but my eyes are troubling me this evening, and I can't bear the light. Miss Omar, I thought the housekeeper had instructed you: one ring means lights, two mean I want Burnett. Here he comes... Burnett, take Sergeant Mulhill through the place. He's looking for a thief. You will accompany the Sergeant, Mr.—Moriway?"

"Thank you—no. If you don't mind, I'll wait out here."

That meant me. I moved toward the gate.

"Not at all. Have a seat. Miss Omar, sit down, won't you?" I sat down.

"Miss Omar reads to me, Mr. Moriway. I'm an invalid, as you see, dependent on the good offices of my man. I find a woman's voice a soothing change."

"It must be. Particularly if the voice is pleasing. Miss Omar—I didn't quite catch the name—"

He waited. But Miss Omar had nothing to say that minute.

"Yes, that's the name. You've got it all right," said Latimer. "An uncommon name, isn't it?"

"I don't think I ever heard it before. Do you know, Miss Omar, as I heard your voice just before we got to the gate, it sounded singularly boyish to me."

"Mr. Latimer does not find it so—do you?" I said as sweet—as sweet as I could coax. How sweet's that, Tom Dorgan?

"Not at all." A little laugh came from Latimer as though he was enjoying a joke all by himself. But Moriway jumped with satisfaction. He knew the voice all right.

"Have you a brother, may I ask?" He leaned over and looked keenly at me.

"I am an orphan," I said sadly, "with no relatives."

"A pitiful position," sneered Moriway. "You look so much like a boy I know that—"

"Do you really think so?" So awfully polite was Latimer to such a rat as Moriway. Why? Well, wait. "I can't agree with you. Do you know, I find Miss Omar very feminine. Of course, short hair—"

"Her hair is short, then!"

"Typhoid," I murmured.

"Too bad!" Moriway sneered.

"Yes," I snapped. "I thought it was at the time. My hair was very heavy and long, and I had a chance to sit in a window at Troyon's where they were advertising a hair tonic and—"

Rotten? Of course it was. I'd no business to gabble, and just because you and your new job, Mag, came to my mind at that minute, there I went putting my foot in it.

Moriway laughed. I didn't like the sound of his laugh.

"Your reader is versatile, Mr. Latimer," he said.

"Yes." Latimer smoothed the soft silk rug that lay over him. "Poverty and that sort of versatility are often bedfellows, eh?... Tell me, Mr. Moriway, these lost diamonds are yours?"

"No. They belong to a—a friend of mine, Mrs. Kingdon."

"Oh! the old lady who was married this afternoon to a young fortune-hunter!" I couldn't resist it.

Moriway jumped out of his seat.

"She was not married," he stuttered. "She—"

"Changed her mind? How sensible of her! Did she find out what a crook the fellow was? What was his name—Morrison? No—Middleway—I have heard it."

"May I ask, Miss Omar"—I didn't have to see his face; his voice told how mad with rage he was—"how you come to be acquainted with a matter that only the contracting parties could possibly know of?"

"Why, they can't have kept it very secret, the old lady and the young rascal who was after her money, for you see we both knew of it; and I wasn't the bride and you certainly weren't the groom, were you?"

An exclamation burst from him.

"Mr. Latimer," he stormed, "may I see you a moment alone?"

Phew! That meant me. But I got up just the same.

"Just keep your seat, Miss Omar." Oh, that silken voice of Latimer's! "Mr. Moriway, I have absolutely no acquaintance with you. I never saw you till to-night. I can't imagine what you may have to say to me, that my secretary—Miss Omar acts in that capacity—may not hear."

"I want to say," burst from Moriway, "that she looks the image of the boy Nat, who stole Mrs. Kingdon's diamonds, that the voice is exactly the same, that—"

"But you have said it, Mr. Moriway—quite successfully intimated it, I assure you."

"She knows of my—of Mrs. Kingdon's marriage, that that boy Nat found out about."

"And you yourself also, as Miss Omar mentioned."

"Myself? Damn it, I'm Moriway, the man she was going to marry. Why shouldn't I—"

"Ah—h!" Latimer's shoulders shook with a gentle laugh. "Well, Mr. Moriway, gentlemen don't swear in my garden. Particularly when ladies are present. Shall we say good evening? Here comes Mulhill now.... Nothing, Sergeant? Too bad the rogue escaped, but you'll catch him. They may get away from you, but they never stay long, do they? Good evening—good evening, Mr. Moriway."

They tramped on and out, Moriway's very back showing his rage. He whispered something to the Sergeant, who turned to look at me but shook his head, and the gate clanged after them.

A long sigh escaped me.

"Warm, isn't it?" Latimer leaned forward. "Now, would you mind ringing again, Miss Omar?"

I bent and groped for the bell and rang it twice.

"How quick you are to learn!" he said. "But I really wanted the light this time.... Just light up, Burnett," he called to the man, who had come out on the porch.

The electric bulb flashed out again just over my head. Latimer turned and looked at me. When I couldn't bear it any longer, I looked defiantly up at him.

"Pardon," he said, smiling; nice teeth he has and clear eyes. "I was just looking for that boyish resemblance Mr. Moriway spoke of. I hold to my first opinion—you're very feminine, Miss Omar. Will you read to me now, if you please?" He pointed to a big open book on the table beside his couch.

"I think—if you don't mind, Mr. Latimer, I'll begin the reading to-morrow." I got up to go. I was through with that garden now.

"But I do mind!"

Silken voice? Not a bit of it! I turned on him so furious I thought I didn't care what came of it—when over by the great gate-post I saw a man crouching—Moriway.

I sat down again and pulled the book farther toward the light.

We didn't learn much poetry at the Cruelty, did we, Mag? But I know some now, just the same. When I began to read I heard only one word—Moriway—Moriway—Moriway. But I must have—forgotten him after a time, and the dark garden with the light on only one spot, and the roses smelling, and Latimer lying perfectly still, his face turned toward me, for I was reading—listen, I bet I can remember that part of it if I say it slow—

Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake:
For all the sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken'd—Man's forgiveness give—and take!

—when all at once Mr. Latimer put his hand on the book. I looked up with a start. The shadow by the gate was gone.

Yon rising Moon that looks for us again—
How oft hereafter will she wax and wane;
How oft hereafter rising look for us
Through this same Garden—and for ONE in vain!

Latimer was saying it without the book and with a queer smile that made me feel I hadn't quite caught on.

"Thank you, that will do," he went on. "That is enough, Miss—" He stopped.

I waited.

He did not say "Omar."

I looked him square in the eye—and then I had enough.

"But what in the devil did you make believe for?" I asked.

He smiled.

"If ever you come to lie on your back day and night, year in and year out, and know that never in your life will it be any different, you may take pleasure in a bit of excitement and—and learn to pity the under dog, who, in this case, happened to be a boy that leaped over the gate as though his heart was in his mouth. Just as you would admire the nerve of the young lady that came out of the house a few minutes after in your housekeeper's Sunday gown."

Yes, grin, Torn Dorgan. You won't grin long.

I put down the book and got up to go.

"Good night, then, and thank you, Mr. Latimer."

"Good night.... Oh, Miss—" He didn't say "Omar"—"there is a favor you might do me."

"Sure!" I wondered what it could be.

"Those diamonds. I've got to have them, you know, to send them back to their owner. I don't mind helping a—a person who helps himself to other people's things, but I can't let him get away with his plunder without being that kind of person myself. So—"

Why didn't I lie? Because there are some people you don't lie to, Tom Dorgan. Don't talk to me, you bully, I'm savage enough. To have rings and pins and ear-rings, a whole bagful of diamonds, and to haul 'em out of your pocket and lay 'em on the table there before him!

"I wonder," he said slowly, as he put them away in his own pocket, "what a man like me could do for a girl like you?"

"Reform her!" I snarled. "Show her how to get diamonds honestly."

Say, Tom, let's go in for bigger game.

III.

Oh, Mag, Mag, for heaven's sake, let me talk to you! No, don't say anything. You must let me tell you. No—don't call the other girls. I can't bear to tell this to anybody but you.

You know how I kicked when Tom hit on Latimer's as the place we were to scuttle. And the harder I kicked the stubborner he got, till he swore he'd do the job without me if I wouldn't come along. Well—this is the rest of it.

The house, you know, stands at the end of the street. If you could walk through the garden with the iron fence you'd come right down the bluff on to the docks and out into East River. Tom and I came up to it from the docks last night. It was dark and wet, you remember. The mud was thick on my trousers—Nance Olden's a boy every time when it comes to doing business.

"We'll blow it all in, Tom," I said, as we climbed. "We'll spend a week at the Waldorf, and then, Tom Dorgan, we'll go to Paris. I want a red coat and hat with chinchilla, like that dear one I lost, and a low-neck satin gown, and a silk petticoat with lace, and a chain with rhinestones, and—"

"Just wait, Sis, till you get out of this. And keep still."

"I can't. I'm so fidgety I must talk or I'll shriek."

"Well, you'll shut up just the same. Do you hear me?"

I shut up, but my teeth chattered so that Tom stopped at the gate.

"Look here, Nance, are you going to flunk? Say it now—yes or no."

That made me mad.

"Tom Dorgan," I said, "I'll bet your own teeth chattered the first time you went in for a thing like this. I'm all right. You'll squeal before I do."

"That's more like. Here's the gate. It's locked. Come, Nance."

With a good, strong swing he boosted me over, handed me the bag of tools and sprang over himself.... He looked kind o' handsome and fine, my Tom, as he lit square and light on his feet beside me. And because he did, I put my arm in his and gave it a squeeze.

Oh, Mag, it was so funny, going through Latimer's garden! There was the garden table where I had sat reading and thinking he took me for Miss Omar. There was the bench where that beast Moriway sat sneering at me. The wheeled chair was gone. And it was so late everything looked asleep. But something was left behind that made me think I heard Latimer's slow, silken voice, and made me feel cheap—turned inside out like an empty pocket—a dirty, ragged pocket with a seam in it.

"You'll stay here, Nancy, and watch," Tom whispered. "You'll whistle once if a cop comes inside the gate, but not before he's inside the gate. Don't whistle too soon—mind that—nor too loud. I'll hear ye all right. And I'll whistle just once if—anything happens. Then you run—hear me? Run like the devil—"

"Tommy—"

"Well, what?"

"Nothing—all right." I wanted to say good-by—but you know Tom.

Mag, were you ever where you oughtn't to be at midnight—alone? No, I know you weren't. 'Twas your ugly little face and your hair that saved you—the red hair we used to guy so at the Cruelty. I can see you now—a freckle-faced, thin little devil, with the tangled hair to the very edge of your ragged skirt, yanked in that first day to the Cruelty when the neighbors complained your crying wouldn't let 'em sleep nights. The old woman had just locked you in there, hadn't she, to starve when she lit out. Mothers are queer, ain't they, when they are queer. I never remember mine.

Yes, I'll go on.

I stood it all right for a time, out there alone in the night. But I never was one to wait patiently. I can't wait—it isn't in me. But there I had to stand and just—God!—just wait.

If I hadn't waited so hard at the very first I wouldn't 'a' given out so soon. But I stood so still and listened so terribly hard that the trees began to whisper and the bushes to crack and creep. I heard things in my head and ears that weren't sounding anywhere else. And all of a sudden—tramp, tramp, tramp—I heard the cop's footsteps.

He stopped over there by the swinging electric light above the gate. I crouched down behind the iron bench.

And my coat caught a twig on a bush and its crack—ck was like a yell.

I thought I'd die. I thought I'd scream. I thought I'd run. I thought I'd faint. But I didn't—for there, asleep on a rug that some one had forgotten to take in, was the house cat. I gave her a quick slap, and she flew out and across the path like a flash.

The cop watched her, his hand on the gate, and passed on.

Mag Monahan, if Tom had come out that minute without a bean and gone home with me, I'd been so relieved I'd never have tried again. But he didn't come. Nothing happened. Nights and nights and nights went by, and the stillness began to sound again. My throat went choking mad. I began to shiver, and I reached for the rug the cat had lain on.

Funny, how some things strike you! This was Latimer's rug. I had noticed it that evening—a warm, soft, mottled green that looked like silk and fur mixed. I could see the way his long, white hands looked on it, and as I touched it I could hear his voice—

Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake:
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken'd—Man's forgiveness give—and take!

Ever hear a man like that say a thing like that? No? Well, it's—it's different. It's as if the river had spoken—or a tree—it's so—it's so different.

That saved me—that verse that I remembered. I said it over and over and over again to myself. I fitted it to the ferry whistles on the bay—to the cop's steps as they passed again—to the roar of the L-train and the jangling of the surface cars.

And right in the middle of it—every drop of blood in my body seemed to leak out of me, and then come rushing back to my head—I heard Tom's whistle.

Oh, it's easy to say "run," and I really meant it when I promised Tom. But you see I hadn't heard that whistle then. When it came, it changed everything. It set the devil in me loose. I felt as if the world was tearing something of mine away from me. Stand for it? Not Nance Olden.

I did run—but it was toward the house. That whistle may have meant "Go!" To me it yelled "Come!"

I got in through the window Tom had left open. The place was still quiet. Nobody inside had heard that whistle so far as I could tell.

I crept along—the carpets were thick and soft and silky as the rug I'd had my hands buried in to keep 'em warm.

Along a long hall and through a great room, whose walls were thick with books, I was making for a light I could see at the back of the house. That's where Tom Dorgan must be and where I must be to find out—to know.

With my hands out in front of me I hurried, but softly, and just as I had reached the portieres below which the light streamed, my arms closed about a thing—cold as marble, naked—I thought it was a dead body upright there, and with a cry, I pitched forward through the curtains into the lighted room.

"Nance!—you devil!"

You recognize it? Yep, it was Tom. Big Tom Dorgan, at the foot of Latimer's bed, his hands above his head, and Latimer's gun aimed right at his heart.

Think of the pluck of that cripple, will you?

His eyes turned on me for just a second, and then fixed themselves again on Tom. But his voice went straight at me, all right.

"You are something of a thankless devil, I must admit, Miss—Omar," he said.

I didn't say anything. You don't say things in answer to things like that. You feel 'em.

Ashamed? What do I care for a man with a voice like that! ... But you should have heard how Tom's growl sounded after it.

"Why the hell didn't you light out?"

"I couldn't, Tom. I just—couldn't," I sobbed.

"There seems invariably to be a misunderstanding of signals where Miss Omar is concerned. Also a disposition to use strong language in the lady's presence. Don't you, young man!"

"Don't you call me Miss Omar!" I blazed, stamping my foot.

He laughed a contemptuous laugh.

I could have killed him then, I hated him so. At least, I thought I could; but just then Tom sent a spark out of the corner of his eye to me that meant—it meant—

You know, Mag, what it would have meant to Latimer if I had done what Tom's eye said.

I thought at first I had done it—it passed through my mind so quick; the sweet words I'd say—the move I'd make—the quick knocking-up of the pistol, and then—

It was that—that sight of Tom, big Tom Dorgan, with rage in his heart and death in his hand, leaping on that cripple's body—it made me sick!

I stood there gasping—stood a moment too long. For the curtains were pushed aside, and Burnett, Latimer's servant, and the cop came in.

Tom didn't fight; he's no fool to waste himself.

But I—well, never mind about me. I caught a glimpse of a crazy white face on a boy's body in the great glass opposite and heard my own voice break into something I'd never heard before.

Tom stood at last with the handcuffs on.

"It's your own fault, you damned little chump!" he said to me, as they went out.

You lie, Mag Monahan, he's no such thing! He may be a hard man to live with, but he's mine—my Tom—my Tom!

What? Latimer?

Well, do you know, it's funny about him. He'd told the cop that I'd peached—peached on Tom! So they went off without me.

Why?

That's what he said himself when we were alone.

"In order to insure for myself another of your most interesting visits, I suppose, Miss—not Omar? All right.... Tell me, can I do nothing for you? Aren't you sick of this sort of life?"

"Get Tom out of jail."

He shook his head.

"I'm too good a friend of yours to do you such a turn."

"I don't want any friend that isn't Tom's."

He threw the pistol from him and pulled himself up, till he sat looking at me.

"In heaven's name, what can you see in a fellow like that?"

"What's that to you?" I turned to go.

"To me? Things of that sort are nothing, of course, to me—me, that 'luckless Pot He marr'd in making.' But, tell me—can a girl like you tell the truth? What made you hesitate when that fellow told you with his eyes to murder me?"

"How did you know?"

"How? The glass. See over yonder. I could watch every expression on both your faces. What was it—what was it, child, that made you—oh, if you owe me a single heart-beat of gratitude, tell me the truth!"

"You've said it yourself."

"What?"

"That line we read the other night about 'the luckless Pot'."

His face went gray and he fell back on his pillows. The strenuous life we'd been leading him, Tom and I, was too much for him, I guess.

Do you know, I really felt sorry I'd said it. But he is a cripple. Did he expect me to say he was big and strong and dashing—like Tom?

I left him there and got out and away. But do you know what I saw, Mag, beside his bed, just as Burnett came to put me out?

My old blue coat with the buttons—the bell-boy's coat I'd left in the housekeeper's room when I borrowed her Sunday rig. The coat was hanging over a chair, and right by it, on a table, was that big book with a picture covering every page, still open at that verse about

Through this same Garden—and for ONE in vain!

IV.

No—no—no! No more whining from Nance Olden. Listen to what I've got to tell you, Mag, listen!

You know where I was coming from yesterday when I passed Troyon's window and grinned up at you, sitting there, framed in bottles of hair tonic, with all that red wig of yours streaming about you?

Yep, from that little, rat-eyed lawyer's office. I was glum as mud. I felt as though Tom and myself were both flies caught by the leg—he by the law and I by the lawyer—in a sticky mess; and the more we flapped our wings and struggled and pulled, the more we hurt and tore ourselves, and the sooner we'd have to give it up.

Oh, that wizen-faced little lawyer that lives on the Tom Dorgans and the Nance Oldens, who don't know which way to turn to get the money! He looks at me out of his red little eyes and measures in dollars what I'd do for Tom. And then he sets his price a notch higher than that.

When I passed the big department store, next to Troyon's, I was thinking of this, and I turned in there, just aching for some of the boodle that flaunts itself in a poor girl's face when she's desperate, from every silk and satin rag, from every lace and jewel in the place.

The funny part of it is that I didn't want it for myself, but for Tom. 'Pon my soul, Mag, though I would have filled my arms with everything I saw, I wouldn't have put on one thing of all the duds; just hiked off to soak 'em and pay the lawyer. I might have been as old and ugly and rich as the yellow-skinned woman opposite me, who was turning over laces on the middle counter, for all these things meant to me—with Tom in jail.

I was thinking this as I looked at her, when all at once I saw—

You know it takes a pretty quick touch, sharp eyes and good nerve to get away with the goods in a big shop like that. Or it takes something altogether different. It was the different way she did it. She took up the piece of lace—it was a big collar, fine like a cobweb picture in threads,—you can guess what it must have been worth if that old sinner, Mother Douty, gave me fifteen dollars for it. She took it up in a quick, eager way, as though she'd found just what she wanted. Then she took out a lace sample from her gold-linked purse and held them both up close to her blinky little eyes, looking at it through a gold lorgnette with emeralds in the handle; pulling it and feeling it with the air of one who knows a fine thing when she sees it, and just what makes it fine. Then she rustled off to the door to examine it closely in the light, and—Mag Monahan, she walked right out with it!

At least, she'd got beyond the inner doors when I tapped her on the shoulder.

"I beg pardon, madam." My best style, Mag.

She pulled herself up haughtily and blinked at me. She was a little, thin mummy of a woman, just wrapped away in silks and velvets, but on the inside of that nervous, little old body of hers there must have been some spring of good material that wasn't all unwound yet.

She stood blinking at me without a word.

"That lace. You haven't paid for it," I said.

Her short-sighted eyes fell from my face to the collar she held in her hand. Her yellow face grew ghastly.

"Oh, mercy! You—you don't—"

"I am a detective for the store, and—"

"But—"

"Sh! We don't like any noise made about these things, and you yourself wouldn't enjoy—"

"Do you know who I am, young woman?" She fumbled in her satchel and passed a card to me.

Glory be! Guess, Mag. Oh, you'd never guess, you dear old Mag! Besides, you haven't got the acquaintance in high society that Nance Olden can boast.

+--------------------------------+
| Mrs. MILLS D. VAN WAGENEN |
+--------------------------------+

Oh—Mag! Shame on you not to know the name even of the Bishop of the great state of—yes, the lean, short little Bishop with a little white beard, and the softest eye and the softest heart and—my very own Bishop, Nancy Olden's Bishop. And this was his wife.

Tut—tut, Mag! Of course not. A bishop's wife may be a kleptomaniac; it's only Cruelty girls that really steal from stores.

"I've met the Bishop, Mrs. Van Wagenen." I didn't say how—she wouldn't appreciate that story.

"And he was once very kind to me. But he would be the first to tell me to do my duty now. I'll do it as quietly as I can for his sake. But you must come with me or I must arrest—"

She put up a shaking hand. Dear little old guy!

"Don't—don't say it! It's all a mistake, which can be rectified in a moment. I've been trying to match this piece of lace for years. I got it at Malta when—when Mills and I—on our honeymoon. When I saw it there on the counter I was so delighted—I never thought—I intended taking it to the light to be sure the pattern was the same, my eyesight is so wretched—and when you spoke to me it was the first inkling I had that I had really taken it without paying! You certainly understand," she pleaded in agitation. "I have no need to steal—you must know that—oh, that I wouldn't—that—I couldn't—If you will just let me pay you—"

Here now, Mag Monahan, don't you get to sneering. She was straight—right on the level, all right. You couldn't listen to that cracked little voice of hers a minute without being sure of it.

I was just about to permit her graciously to pay me the money,—for my friend? the dear Bishop's sake, of course,—when a big floor-walker happened to catch sight of us.

"If you'll come with me, Mrs. Van Wagenen, to a dressing-room, I'll arrange your collar for you," I said very loud. And then, in a whisper: "Of course, I understand, but the thing may look different to other people. And that big floor-walker there gets a commission from the newspapers every time he tells them—"

She gave a squawk for all the world like a dried-up little hen scuttling out of a yellow dog's way, and we took the elevator to the second floor.

The minute I closed the door of the little fitting-room she held out the lace to me.

"I have changed my mind," she said, "and shall give you the lace back. I will not keep it. I can not—I can not bear the sight of it. It terrifies me and shocks me. I can take no pleasure in it. Besides—besides, it will be discipline for me to do without it now that I have found it after all these years. Every day I shall look at the place in my collection which it would have occupied, and I shall say to myself: 'Maria Van Wagenen, take warning. See to what terrible straits a worldly passion may bring one; what unconscious greed may do!' I shall give the money to Mills for charity and I will never—never fill that place in my collection."

"What good will that do?" I asked, puzzled, while I folded the collar up into a very small package.

"You mean that I ought to submit to the exposure—that I deserve the lesson and the punishment—not for stealing, but for being absorbed in worldly things. Perhaps you are right. It certainly shows that you have at some time been under Mills' spiritual care, my dear. I wonder if he would insist—whether I ought—yes, I suppose he would. Oh!"

A saleswoman's head was thrust in the door. "Excuse me," she said, "I thought the room was empty."

"We've just finished trying on," I said sweetly.

"Don't go!" The Bishop's wife turned to her, her little fluttering hands held out appealingly. "And do not misunderstand me. The thing may seem wrong in your eyes, as this young woman says, but if you will listen patiently to my explanations I am sure you will see that it was a mere eager over-sight—the fault of absent-mindedness, hardly the sin of covetousness, and surely not a crime. I am making this confession—"

The tender conscience of the dear, blameless little soul! She was actually giving herself away. Worse—she was giving me away, too. But I couldn't stand that. I saw the saleswoman's puzzled face—she was a tall woman with a big bust, big hips and the big head all right, and she wore her long-train black rig for all the world like a Cruelty girl who had stolen the matron's skirt to "play lady" in. I got behind little Mrs. Bishop, and looking out over her head, I tapped my forehead significantly.

The saleswoman tumbled. That was all right. But so did the Bishop's wife; for she turned and caught me at it.

"You shall not save me from myself and what I deserve," she cried. "I am perfectly sane and you know it, and you are doing me no favor in trying to create the contrary impression. I demand an—"

"An interview with the manager," I interrupted. "I'm sure Mrs. Van Wagenen can see the manager. Just go with the lady, Mrs. Van Wagenen, and I'll follow with the goods."

She did it meek as a lamb, talking all the time, but never beginning at the beginning—luckily for me. So that I had time to slip from one dressing-room to the next, with the lace up my sleeve, out to the elevator, and down into the street.

D'ye know what heaven must be, Mag? A place where you always get away with the swag, and where it's always just the minute after you've made a killing.

Cocky? Well, I should say I was. I was drunk enough with success to take big chances. And just while I was wishing for something really big to tackle, it came along in the shape of that big floor-walker!

He was without a hat, and his eyes looked fifty ways at once. But you've got to look fifty-one if you want to catch Nance Olden. I ran up the stairs of the first flat-house and rang the bell. And as I sailed up in the elevator I saw the big floor-walker hurry past; he'd lost the scent.

The boy let me off at the top floor, and after the elevator had gone down I walked up to the roof. It was fine 'way up there, so still and high, with the lights coming out down in the town. And I took out my pretty lace collar and put it around my neck, wishing I could keep it and wishing that I had, at least, a glass to see myself in it just once, when my eye caught the window of the next house.

It would do for a mirror all right, for the dark green shade was down. But at sight of the shade blowing in the wind I forgot all about the collar.

It's this way, Mag, when they press you too far; and that little rat of a lawyer had got me most to the wall. I looked at the window, measuring the little climb it would be for me to get to it,—the house next door was just one story higher than the one where I was, so its top story was on a level with the roof nearly where I stood. And I made up my—mind to get what would let Tom off easy, or break into jail myself.

And so I didn't care much what I might fall into through that window. And perhaps because I didn't care, I slipped into a dark hall, and not a thing stirred; not a footstep creaked. I felt like the Princess—Princess Nancy Olden—come to wake the Sleeping Beauty; some dude it'd be that would have curly hair like Tom Dorgan's, and would wear clothes like my friend Latimer's, over in Brooklyn.

Can you see me there, standing on one leg like a stork, ready to lie or to fly at the first sound?

Well, the first sound didn't come. Neither did the second. In fact, none of 'em came unless I made 'em myself.

Softly as Molly goes when the baby's just dropped off to sleep, I walked toward an open door. It was a parlor, smelly with tobacco, and with lots of papers and books around. And nary a he-beauty—nor any other kind.

I tried the door of a room next to it. A bedroom. But no Beauty.

Silly! Don't you tumble yet? It was a bachelor's apartment, and the Bachelor Beauty was out, and Princess Nancy had the place all to herself.

I suppose I really ought to have left my card—or he wouldn't know who had waked him—but I hadn't intended to go calling when I left home. So I thought I'd look for one of his as a souvenir—and anything else of his I could make use of.

There were shirts I'd liked for Tom, dandy colored ones, and suits with checks in 'em and without. But I wanted something easy and small and flat, made of crackly printed yellow or green paper, with numbers on it.

How did I know he had anything like that? Why, Mag, Mag Monahan, one would think you belonged to the Bishop's set, you're so simple!

I had to turn on the electric light after a bit—it got so dark. And I don't like light in other people's houses when they're not at home, and neither am I. But there was nothing in the bedroom except some pearl studs. I got those and then went back to the parlor.

The desk caught my eye. Oh, Mag, it had the loveliest pictures on it—pictures of swell actresses and dancers. It was mahogany, with lots of little drawers and two curvy side boxes. I pulled open all the drawers. They were full of papers all right, but they were printed, cut from newspapers, and all about theaters.

"You can't feed things like this, Nance, to that shark of a lawyer," I said to myself, pushing the box on the side impatiently.

And then I giggled outright.

Why?

Just 'cause—I had pushed that side box till it swung aside on hinges I didn't know about, and there, in a little secret nest, was a pile of those same crisp, crinkly paper things I'd been looking for. 20—40—60—110—160—210—260—310!

Three hundred and ten dollars, Mag Monahan. Three hundred and ten, and Nance Olden!

"Glory be!" I whispered.

"Glory be damned!" I heard behind me.

I turned. The bills just leaked out of my hand on to the floor.

The Bachelor Beauty had come home, Mag, and nabbed the poor Princess, instead of her catching him napping.

He wasn't a beauty either—a big, stout fellow with a black mustache. His hand on my shoulder held me tight, but the look in his eyes behind his glasses held me tighter. I threw out my arms over the desk and hid my face.

Caught! Nancy Olden, with her hands dripping, and not a lie in her smart mouth!

He picked up the bills I had dropped, counted them and put them in his pocket. Then he unhooked a telephone and lifted the stand from his desk.

"Hello! Spring 3100—please. Hello! Chief's office? This is Obermuller, Standard Theater. I want an officer to take charge of a thief I've caught in my apartments here at the Bronsonia. Yes, right on the corner. Hold him till you come? Well—rather!"

He put down the 'phone. I pulled the pearl studs out of my pocket.

"You might as well take these, too," I said.

"So thoughtful of you, seeing that you'd be searched! But I'll take 'em, anyway. You intended them for—Him? You didn't get anything else?"

I shook my head as I lay there.

"Hum!" It was half a laugh, and half a sneer. I hated him for it, as he sat leaning back on the back legs of his chair, his thumbs in his arm-holes. I felt his eyes—those smart, keen eyes, burning into my miserable head. I thought of the lawyer and the deal he'd give poor Tom, and all at once—

You'd have sniffled yourself, Mag Monahan. There I was—caught. The cop'd be after me in five minutes. With Tom jugged, and me in stripes—it wasn't very jolly, and I lost my nerve.

"Ashamed—huh?" he said lightly.

I nodded. I was ashamed.

"Pity you didn't get ashamed before you broke in here."

"What the devil was there to be ashamed of?"

The sting in his voice had cured me. I never was a weeper. I sat up, my face blazing, and stared at him. He'd got me to hand over to the cop, but he hadn't got me to sneer at.

I saw by the look he gave me, that he hadn't really seen me till then.

"Well," he answered, "what the devil is there to be ashamed of now?"

"Of being caught—that's what."

"Oh!"

He tilted back again on his chair and laughed softly.

"Then you're not ashamed of your profession?"

"Are you of yours?"

"Well—there's a slight difference."

"Not much, whatever it may be. It's your graft—it's everybody's—to take all he can get, and keep out of jail. That's mine, too."

"But you see I keep out of jail."

"I see you're not there—yet."

"Oh, I think you needn't worry about that. I'll keep out, thank you; imprisonment for debt don't go nowadays."

"Debt?"

"I'm a theatrical manager, my girl, and I'm not on the inside: which is another way of saying that a man who can't swim has fallen overboard."

"And when you do go down—"

"A little less exultation, my dear, or I might suppose you'd be glad when I do."

"Well, when you know yourself going down for the last time, do you mean to tell me you won't grasp at a straw like—like this?" I nodded toward the open window, and the desk with all its papers tumbling out.

"Not much." He shook his head, and bit the end of a cigar with sharp, white teeth. "It's a fool graft. I'm self-respecting. And I don't admire fools." He lit his cigar and puffed a minute, taking out his watch to look at it, as cold-bloodedly as though we were waiting, he and I, to go to supper together. Oh, how I hated him!

"Honesty isn't the best policy," he went on; "it's the only one. The vain fool that gets it into his head—or shall I say her head? No? Well, no offense, I assure you—his head then, that he's smarter than a world full of experience, ought to be put in jail—for his own protection; he's too big a jay to be left out of doors. For five thousand years, more or less, the world has been putting people like him behind bars, where they can't make asses of themselves. Yet each year, and every day and every hour, a new ninny is born who fancies he's cleverer than all his predecessors put together. Talk about suckers! Why, they're giants of intellect compared to the mentally lop-sided that five thousand years of experience can't teach. When the criminal-clown's turn comes, he hops, skips and jumps into the ring with the old, old gag. He thinks it's new, because he himself is so fresh and green. 'Here I am again,' he yells, 'the fellow that'll do you up. Others have tried it. They're dead in jail or under jail-yards. But me—just watch me!' We do, and after a little we put him with his mates and a keeper in a barred kindergarten where fools that can't learn, little moral cripples of both sexes, my dear, belong. Bah!" He puffed out the smoke, throwing his head back, in a cloud toward the ceiling.

I sprang from my seat and faced him. I was tingling all through. I didn't care a rap what became of me for just that minute. I forgot about Tom. I prayed that the cop wouldn't come for a minute yet—but only that I might answer him.

"You're mighty smart, ain't you? You can sit back here and sneer at me, can't you? And feel so big and smart and triumphant! What've you done but catch a girl at her first bungling job! It makes you feel awfully cocky, don't it? 'What a big man am I!' Bah!" I blew the smoke up toward the ceiling from my mouth, with just that satisfied gall that he had had; or rather, I pretended to. He let down the front legs of his chair and began to stare at me.

"And you don't know it all, Mr. Manager, not you. Your clown-criminal don't jump into the ring because he's so full of fun he can't stay out. He goes in for the same reason the real clown does—because he gets hungry and thirsty and sleepy and tired like other men, and he's got to fill his stomach and cover his back and get a place to sleep. And it's because your kind gets too much, that my kind gets so little it has to piece it out with this sort of thing. No, you don't know it quite all.

"There's a girl named Nancy Olden that could tell you a lot, smart as you are. She could show you the inside of the Cruelty, where she was put so young she never knew that children had mothers and fathers, till a red-haired girl named Mag Monahan told her; and then she was mighty glad she hadn't any. She thought that all little girls were bloodless and dirty, and all little boys were filthy and had black purple marks where their fathers had tried to gouge out their eyes. She thought all women were like the matron who came with a visitor up to the bare room, where we played without toys—the new, dirty, newly-bruised ones of us, and the old, clean, healing ones of us—and said, 'Here, chicks, is a lady who's come to see you. Tell her how happy you are here.' Then Mag's freckled little face, her finger in her mouth, looked up like this. She was always afraid it might be her mother come for her. And the crippled boy jerked himself this way—I used to mimic him, and he'd laugh with the rest of them—over the bare floor. He always hoped for a penny. Sometimes he even got it.

"And the boy with the gouged eye—he would hold his pants up like this. He had just come in, and there was nothing to fit him. And he'd put his other hand over his bad eye and blink up at her like this. And the littlest boy—oh, ha! ha! ha!—you ought have seen that littlest boy. He was in skirts, an old dress they'd given me to wear the first day I came; there were no pants small enough for him. He'd back up into the corner and hide his face—like this—and peep over his shoulder; he had a squint that way, that made his face so funny. See, it makes you laugh yourself. But his body—my God!—it was blue with welts! And me—I'd put the baby down that'd been left on the door-steps of the Cruelty, and I'd waltz up to the lady, the nice, patronizing, rich lady, with her handkerchief to her nose and her lorgnette to her eyes—see, like this. I knew just what graft would work her. I knew what she wanted there. I'd learned. So I'd make her a curtsy like this, and in the piousest sing-song I'd—"

There was a heavy step out in the hall—it was the policeman! I'd forgot while I was talking. I was back—back in the empty garret, at the top of the Cruelty. I could smell the smell of the poor, the dirty, weak, sick poor. I could taste the porridge in the thick little bowls, like those in the bear story Molly tells her kid. I could hear the stifled sobs that wise, poor children give—quiet ones, so they'll not be beaten again. I could feel the night, when strange, deserted, tortured babies lie for the first time, each in his small white cot, the new ones waking the old with their cries in a nightmare of what had happened before they got to the Cruelty. I could see the world barred over, as I saw it first through the Cruelty's barred windows, and as I must see it again, now that—

"You see, you don't know it quite all—yet, Mr. Manager!" I spat it out at him, and then walked to the cop, my hands ready for the bracelets.

"But there's one thing I do know!" He's a big fellow but quick on his feet, and in a minute he was up and between me and the cop. "And there isn't a theatrical man in all America that knows it quicker than Fred Obermuller, that can detect it sooner and develop it better. And you've got it, girl, you've got it! ... Officer, take this for your trouble. I couldn't hold the fellow, after all. Never mind which way he went; I'll call up the office and explain."

He shut the door after the cop, and came back to me. I had fallen into a chair. My knees were weak, and I was trembling all over.

"Have you seen the playlet Charity at the Vaudeville?" he roared at me.

I shook my head.

"Well, it's a scene in a foundling asylum. Here's a pass. Go up now and see it. If you hurry you'll get there just in time for that act. Then if you come to me at the office in the morning at ten, I'll give you a chance as one of the Charity girls. Do you want it?"

God, Mag! Do I want it!

V.

Do you remember Lady Patronesses' Day at the Cruelty, Mag? Remember how the place smelt of cleaning ammonia on the bare floors? Remember the black dresses we all wore, and the white aprons with the little bibs, and the oily sweetness of the matron, and how our faces shone and tingled from the soap and the rubbing? Remember it all?

Well, who'd 'a' thought then that Nance Olden ever would make use of it—on the level, too!

Drop the Cruelty, and tell you about the stage? Why, it's bare boards back there, bare as the Cruelty, but oh, there's something that you don't see, but you feel it—something magic that makes you want to pinch yourself to be sure you're awake. I go round there just doped with it; my face, if you could see it, must look like Molly's kid's when she is telling him fairy stories.

I love it, Mag! I love it!

And what do I do? That's what I was trying to tell you about the Cruelty for. It's in a little act that was made for Lady Gray, that there are four Charity girls on the stage, and I'm one of 'em.

Lady Gray? Why, Mag, how can you ever hope to get on if you don't know who's who? How can you expect me to associate with you if you're so ignorant? Yes—a real Lady, as real as the wife of a Lord can be. Lord Harold Gray's a sure enough Lord, and she's his wife but—but a chippy, just the same; that's what she is, in spite of the Gray emeralds and that great Gray rose diamond she wears on the tiniest chain around her scraggy neck. Do you know, Mag Monahan, that this Lady Harold Gray was just a chorus girl—and a sweet chorus it must have been if she sang there!—when she nabbed Lord Harold?

You'd better keep your eye on Nancy Olden, or first thing you know she'll marry the Czar of Russia—or Tom Dorgan, poor fellow, when he gets out! ... Well, just the same, Mag, if that white-faced, scrawny little creature can be a Lady, a girl with ten times her brains, and at least half a dozen times her good looks—oh, we're not shy on the stage, Mag, about throwing bouquets at ourselves!

Can she act? Don't be silly, Mag! Can't you see that Obermuller's just hiring her title and playing it in big letters on the bills for all it's worth? She acts the Lady Patroness, come to look at us Charity girls. She comes on, though, looking like a fairy princess. Her dress is just blazing with diamonds. There's the Lady's coronet in her hair. Her thin little arms are banded with gold and diamonds, and on her neck—O Mag, Mag, that rose diamond is the color of rose-leaves in a fountain's jet through which the sun is shining. It's long—long as my thumb—I swear it is, Mag—nearly, and it blazes, oh, it blazes—

Well, it blazes dollars into Obermuller's box all right, for the Gray jewels are advertised in the bill with this one at the head of the list, the star of them all.

You see it's this way: Lord Harold Gray's bankrupt. He's poor as—as Nance Olden. Isn't that funny? But he's got the family jewels all right, to have as long as he lives. Nary a one can he sell, though, for after his death, they go to the next Lord Gray. So he makes 'em make a living for him, and as they can't go on and exhibit themselves, Lady Gray sports 'em—and draws down two hundred dollars a week.

Yep—two hundred.

But do you know it isn't the two hundred dollars a week that makes me envy her till I'm sick; it's that rose diamond. If you could only see it, Mag, you'd sympathize with me, and understand why my fingers just itched for it the first night I saw her come on.

'Pon my soul, Mag, the sight of it blazing on her neck dazzled me so that it shut out all the staring audience that first night, and I even forgot to have stage fright.

"What's doped you, Olden?" Obermuller asked when the curtain went down, and we all hurried to the wings.

I was in the black dress with the white-bibbed apron, and I looked up at him still dazed by the shine of that diamond and my longing for it. You'd almost kill with your own hands for a diamond like that, Mag!

"Doped? Why—what didn't I do?" I asked him.

"That's just it," he said, looking at me curiously; but I could feel his disappointment in me.

"You didn't do anything—not a blasted thing more than you were told to do. The world's full of supers that can do that."

For just a minute I forgot the diamond.

"Then—it's a mistake? You were wrong and—and I can't be an actress?"

He threw back his head before he answered, puffing a mouthful of smoke up at the ceiling, as he did the night he caught me. The gesture itself seemed to remind him of what had made him think in the first place he could make an actress of me. For he laughed down at me, and I saw he remembered.

"Well," he said, "we'll wait and see... I was mistaken, though, sure enough, about one thing that night." I looked up at him.

"You're a darn sight prettier than I thought you were. The gold brick you sold me isn't all—"

He put out his hand to touch my chin. I side-stepped, and he turned laughing to the stage.

But he called after me.

"Is a beauty success going to content you, Olden?"

"Well, we'll wait and see," I drawled back at him in his own throaty bass.

Oh, I was drunk, Mag, drunk with thinking about that diamond! I didn't care even to please Obermuller. I just wanted the feel of that diamond in my hand. I wanted it lying on my own neck—the lovely, cool, shining, rosy thing. It's like the sunrise, Mag, that beauty stone. It's just a tiny pool of water blushing. It's—

How to get it! How to get away with it! On what we'd get for that diamond, Tom and I—when his time is up—could live for all our lives and whoop it up besides. We could live in Paris, where great grafters live and grafting pays—where, if you've got wit and fifty thousand dollars, and happen to be a "darn sight prettier," you can just spin the world around your little finger!

But, do you know, even then I couldn't bear to think of selling the pretty thing? It hurt me to think of anybody having it but just Nance Olden.

But I hadn't got it yet.

Gray has a dressing-room to herself. And on her table—which is a big box, open end down—just where the three-sided big mirror can multiply the jewels and make you want 'em three times as bad, her big russia-leather, silver-mounted box lies open, while she's dressing and undressing. Other times it's locked tight, and his Lordship himself has it tight in his own right hand, or his Lordship's man, Topham, has it just as tight.

How to get that diamond! There was a hard nut for Nance Olden's sharp teeth to crack. I only wanted that—never say I'm greedy, Mag—Gray could keep all the rest of the things—the pigeon in rubies and pearls, the tiara all in diamonds, the chain of pearls, and the blazing rings, and the waist-trimming all of emeralds and diamond stars. But that diamond, that huge rose diamond, I couldn't, I just couldn't let her have it.

And yet I didn't know the first step to take toward getting it, till Beryl Blackburn helped me out. She's one of the Charities, like me—a tall bleached blonde with a pretty, pale face and gold-gray eyes. And, if you'd believe her, there's not a man in the audience, afternoon or evening, that isn't dead-gone on her.

"Guess who's my latest," she said to me this afternoon, while we four Charities stood in the wings waiting. "Topham—old Topham!"

It all got clear to me then in a minute.

"Topham—nothing!" I sneered. "Beryl Big-head, Topham thinks of only one thing—Milady's jewel-box. Don't you fool yourself."

"Oh, does he, Miss! Well, just to prove it, he let me try on the rose diamond last night. There!"

"It's easy to say so but I don't see the proof. He'd lose his job so quick it'd make his head spin if he did it."

"Not if he did, but if they knew he did. You'll not tell?"

"Not me. Why would I? I don't believe it, and I wouldn't expect anybody else to. I don't believe you could get Topham to budge from his chair in Gray's dressing-room if you'd—"

"What'll you bet?"

"I'll bet you the biggest box of chocolate creams at Huyler's."

"Done! I'll send for him to-night, just before Gray and her Lord come, and you see—"

"How'll I see? Where'll I be?"

"Well, you be waiting in the little hall, right of Gray's dressing-room at seven-thirty to-night and—you might as well bring the creams with you."

Catch on, Mag? At seven-thirty in the evening I was waiting; but not in the little hall of Gray's dressing-room. I hadn't gone home at all after the afternoon performance—you know we play at three, and again at eight-thirty. I had just hidden me away till the rest were gone, and as soon as the coast was clear I got into Gray's dressing-room, pushed aside the chintz curtains of the big box that makes her dressing-table—and waited.

Lord, how the hours dragged! I hadn't had anything to eat since lunch, and it got darker and darker in there, and hot and close and cramped. I put in the time, much as I could, thinking of Tom. The very first thing I'd do after cashing in, would be to get up to Sing Sing to see him. I'm crazy to see him. I'd tell him the news and see if he couldn't bribe a guard, or plan some scheme with me to get out soon.

Afraid—me? What of? If they found me under that box I'd just give 'em the Beryl story about the bet. How do you know they wouldn't believe it? ... Oh, I don't care, you've got to take chances, Mag Monahan, if you go in for big things. And this was big—huge. Do you know how much that diamond's worth? And do you know how to spend fifty thousand?

I spent it all there—in the box—every penny of it. When I got tired spending money I dozed a bit and, in my dream, spent it over again. And then I waked and tried to fancy new ways of getting rid of it, but my head ached, and my back ached, and my whole body was so strained and cramped that I was on the point of giving it all up when—that blessed old Topham came in.

He set the big box down with a bang that nearly cracked my head. He turned on the lights, and stood whistling Tommy Atkins. And then suddenly there came a soft call, "Topham! Topham!"

I leaned back and bit my fingers till I knew I wouldn't shriek. The Englishman listened a minute. Then the call came again, and Topham creaked to the door and out.

In a twinkling I was out, too, you bet.

Mag! He hadn't opened the box at all! There it stood in the middle of the space framed by the three glasses. I pulled at the lid. Locked! I could have screamed with rage. But the sound of his step outside the door sobered me. He was coming back. In a frantic hurry I turned toward the window which I had unlocked when I came in four hours ago. But I hadn't time to make it. I heard the old fellow's hand on the door, and I tumbled back into the box in such a rush that the curtains were still waving when he came in.

Slowly he began to place the jewels, one by one, in the order her Ladyship puts them on. We Charity girls had often watched him from the door—he never let one of us put a foot inside. He was method and order itself. He never changed the order in which he lifted the glittering things out, nor the places he put them back in. I put my hand up against the top of the box, tracing the spot where each piece would be lying. Think, Mag, just half an inch between me and quarter of a million!

Oh, I was sore as I lay there! And I wasn't so cock-sure either that I'd get out of it straight. I tried the Beryl story lots of ways on myself, but somehow, every time I fancied myself telling it to Obermuller, it got tangled up and lay dumb and heavy inside of me.

But at least it would be better to appear of my own will before the old Englishman than be discovered by Lord Gray and his Lady. I had my fingers on the curtains, and in another second I'd been out when—

"Miss Beryl Blackburn's compliments, Mr. Topham, and would you step to the door, as there's something most important she wants to tell you."

Oh, I loved every syllable that call-boy spoke! There was a giggle behind his voice, too; old Topham was the butt of every joke. The first call, which had fooled me, must have been from some giddy girl who wanted to guy the old fellow. She had fooled me all right. But this—this one was the real article.

There was a pause—Topham must be looking about to be sure things were safe. Then he creaked to the door and shut it carefully behind him.

It only took a minute, but in that minute—in that minute, Mag, I had the rose diamond clutched safe in my fingers; I was on the top of the big trunk and out of the window.

Oh, the feel of that beautiful thing in my hand! I'd 'a' loved it if it hadn't been worth a penny, but as it was I adored it. I slipped the chain under my collar, and the diamond slid down my neck, and I felt its kiss on my skin. I flew down the black corridor, bumping into scenery and nearly tripping two stage carpenters. I heard Ginger, the call-boy, ahead of me and dodged behind some properties just in time. He went whistling past and I got to the stage door.

I pulled it open tenderly, cautiously, and turned to shut it after me.

And—

And something held it open in spite of me.

No—no, Mag, it wasn't a man. It was a memory. It rose up there and hit me right over the heart—the memory of Nancy Olden's happiness the first time she'd come in this very door, feeling that she actually had a right to use a stage: entrance, feeling that she belonged, she—Nancy—to this wonderland of the stage!

You must never tell Tom, Mag, promise! He wouldn't see. He couldn't understand. I couldn't make him know what I felt any more than I'd dare tell him what I did.

I shut the door.

But not behind me. I shut it on the street and—Mag, I shut for ever another door, too; the old door that opens out on Crooked Street. With my hand on my heart, that was beating as though it would burst, I flew back again through the black corridor, through the wings and out to Obermuller's office. With both my hands I ripped open the neck of my dress, and, pulling the chain with that great diamond hanging to it, I broke it with a tug, and threw the whole thing down on the desk in front of him.

"For God's sake!" I yelled. "Don't make it so easy for me to steal!"

I don't know what happened for a minute. I could see his face change half a dozen ways in as many seconds. He took it up in his fingers at last. It swung there at the end of the slender little broken chain like a great drop of shining water, blushing and sparkling and trembling.

His hands trembled, too, and he looked up at last from the diamond to my face.

"It's worth at least fifty thousand, you know—valued at that."

I didn't answer.

He got up and came over to where I had thrown myself on a bench.

"What's the matter, Olden? Don't I pay you enough?"

"I want to see Tom," I begged. "It's so long since he—He's up at—at—in the country."

"Sing Sing?"

I nodded.

"You poor little devil!"

That finished me. I'm not used to being pitied. I sobbed and sobbed as though some dam had broken inside of me. You see, Mag, I knew in that minute that I'd been afraid, deathly afraid of Fred Obermuller's face, when it's scornful and sarcastic, and of his voice, when it cuts the flesh of self-conceit off your very bones. And the contrast—well, it was too much for me.

But something came quick to sober me.

It was Gray. She stormed in, followed by Lord Harold and Topham, and half the company.

"The diamond, the rose diamond!" she shrieked. "It's gone! And the carpenters say that new girl Olden came flying from the direction of my dressing-room. I'll hold you responsible—"

"Hush-sh!" Obermuller lifted his hands and nodded over toward me.

"Olden!" she squealed. "Grab her, Topham. I'll bet she stole that diamond, and she can't have got rid of it yet."

Topham jumped toward me, but Obermuller stopped him.

"You'd win only half your bet, my Lady," Obermuller said softly. "She did get hold of the Gray rose, worth fifty thousand dollars, in spite of all your precautions—"

The world seemed to fall away from me. I looked up at him. I couldn't believe he'd go back on me.

"—And she brought it straight to me, as I had asked her to, and promised to raise her salary if she'd win out. For I knew that unless I proved to you it could be stolen, you'd never agree to hire a detective to watch those things, which will get us all into trouble some day. Here! Scoot out o' this. It's nearly time for your number."

He passed the diamond over to her, and they all left the office.

So did I; but he held out his hand as I passed. "It goes—that about a raise for you, Olden. Now earn it."

Isn't he white, Mag—white clean through, that big fellow Obermuller?

VI.

I got into the train, Mag, the happiest girl in all the country. I'd a big basket of things for Tom. I was got up in my Sunday best, for I wanted to make a hit with some fellow with a key up there, who'd make things soft and easy for my Tommy.

I had so much to tell him. I knew just how I'd take off every member of the company to amuse him. I had memorized every joke I'd heard since I'd got behind the curtain—not very hard for me; things always had a way of sticking in my mind. I knew the newest songs in town, and the choruses of all the old ones. I could show him the latest tricks with cards—I'd got those at first hand from Professor Haughwout. You know how great Tom is on tricks. I could explain the disappearing woman mystery, and the mirror cabinet. I knew the clog dance that Dewitt and Daniels do. I had pictures of the trained seals, the great elephant act, Mademoiselle Picotte doing her great tight-rope dance, and the Brothers Borodini in their pyramid tumbling.

Yes, it was a whole vaudeville show, with refreshments between the acts, that I was taking up to Tom Dorgan. I don't care much for a lot of that truck—funny, isn't it, how you get to turn up your nose at the things you'd have given a finger for once upon a time? But Tom—oh, I'd got everything pat for him—my big, handsome Tom Dorgan in stripes—with his curls all shaved off—ugh!

I'd got just so far in my thoughts, sitting there in the train, when I gave a shiver. I thought for a minute it was at the idea of my Tom with one of those bare, round convict-heads on him, that look like fat skeleton faces. But it wasn't. It was—

Guess, Mag.

Moriway.

Both of us thought the same thing of each other for the first second that our eyes met. I could see that. He thought I was caught at last. And I thought he'd been sharp once too often.

And, Mag, it would be hard to say which of us would have been happier if it had been the truth. Oh, to meet Moriway, bound sure enough for Sing Sing!

He got up and came over to me, smiling wickedly. He took the seat behind me, and leaning forward, said softly:

"Is Miss Omar engaged to read to some invalid up at Sing Sing? And for how long a term—I should say, engagement?"

I'd got through shivering by then. I was ready for him. I turned and looked at him in that very polite, distant sort o' way Gray uses in her act when the Charity superintendent speaks to her. It's the only decent thing she does; chances are that that's how Lord Gray's mother looks at her.

"You know my sister, Mr.—Mr.—" I asked humbly.

He looked at me, perplexed for just a second.

"Sister be hanged!" he said at last. "I know you, Nat, and I'm glad to my finger-tips that you've got it in the neck, in spite of all your smartness."

"You're altogether wrong, sir," I said very stately, but hurt a bit, you know. "I've often been taken for my sister, but gentlemen usually apologize when I explain to them. It's hard enough to have a sister who—" I looked up at him tearfully, with my chin a-wabble with sorrow.

He grinned.

"Liars should have good memories," he sneered. "Miss Omar said she was an orphan, you remember, and had not a relative in the world."

"Did she say that? Did Nora say that?" I exclaimed piteously. "Oh, what a little liar she is! I suppose she thought it made her more interesting to be so alone, more appealing to kind-hearted gentlemen like yourself. I hope she wasn't ungrateful to you, too, as she was to that kind Mr. Latimer, before he found her out. And she had such a good position there, too!"

I wanted to look at him, oh, I wanted to! But it was my role to sit there with downcast eyes, just—the picture of holy grief. I was the good one—the good, shocked sister, and though I wasn't a bit afraid of anything he could do to me, or any game he could put up, I yearned to make him believe me—just because he was so suspicious, so wickedly smart, so sure he was on.

But his very silence sort of told me he almost believed, or that he was laying a trap.

"Will you tell me," he said, "how you—your sister got Latimer to lie for her?"

"Mr. Latimer—lie! Oh, you don't know him. He expected a lady to read to him that very evening. He had never seen her, and when Nora walked into the garden—"

"After getting a skirt somewhere."

"Yes—the housekeeper's, it happened to be her evening out—why, he just naturally supposed Nora was Miss Omar."

"Ah! then her name isn't Omar. What might it be?"

"I'd rather not tell—if you don't mind."

"But when Latimer found out she had the diamonds—he did find out?"

"She confessed to him. Nora's not really so bad a girl as—"

"Very interesting! But it doesn't happen to be Latimer's version. And you say Latimer wouldn't lie."

I got pale—but the paleness was on the inside of me. Think I was going to flinch before a chump like Moriway, even if I had walked straight into his trap?

"It isn't?" I exclaimed.

"No. Latimer's note to Mrs. Kingdon said the diamonds were found in the bell-boy's jacket the thief had left behind him."

"Well! It only shows what a bad habit lying is. Nora must have fibbed to me, for the pure pleasure of fibbing. I'll never dare to trust her again. Do you believe then that she didn't have anything to do with the hotel robbery? I do hope so. It's one less sin on her wicked head. It's hard, having such a girl in the family!" Oh, wasn't I grieved!

He looked me straight in the eye. I looked at him. I was unutterably sad about that tough sister of mine, and I vow I looked holy then, though I never did before and may never again.

"Well, I only saw her in the twilight," he said slowly, watching my face all the time. "You two sisters are certainly miraculously alike."

The train was slowing down, and I got up with my basket. I stood right before him, my full face turned toward him.

"Are we?" I asked simply. "Don't you think it's more the expression than anything else, and the voice? Nora's really much fairer than I am. Good-by."

He watched me as I went out. I felt his eyes on the back of my jacket, and I was tempted to turn at the door and make a face at him. But I knew something better and safer than that. I waited till the train was just pulling out, and then, standing below his window, I motioned to him to raise it.

He did.

"I thought you were going to get out here," I called. "Are you sure you don't belong in Sing Sing, Mr. Moriway?"

I can see his face yet, Mag, and every time I think of it, it makes me nearly die of laughing. He had actually been fooled another time. It was worth the trip up there, to make a guy of him once more.

And whether it was or not, Mag, it was all I got, after all. For—would you believe Tom Dorgan would turn out such a sorehead? He's kicked up such a row ever since he got there, that it's the dark cell for him, and solitary confinement. Think of it—for Tom!

I begged, I bluffed, I cried, I coaxed, but many's the Nance Olden that has played her game against the rules of Sing Sing, and lost. They wouldn't even let me leave the things for him, or give him a message from me. And back to the station I had to carry the basket, and all the schemes I had to make old Tom Dorgan grin.

All the way back I had him in my mind. He's a tiger—Tom—when he's roused. I could see him, shut up there by himself, with not a soul to talk to, with not a human eye to look into, with not a thing on earth to do—Tom, who's action itself! He never was much of a thinker, and I never saw him read even a newspaper. What would he do to kill the time? Can't you see him there, at bay, back on his haunches, cursing and cursed, alone in the everlasting black silence?

I saw nothing else. Wherever I turned my eyes, that terrible picture was before me. And always it was just on the verge of becoming something else—something worse. He could throttle the world with his bare hands, if it had but one neck, in the mood he must be in now.

It was when I couldn't bear it a moment longer that I set my mind to find something else to think of.

I found it, Mag. Do you know what it was? It was just three words—of Obermuller's: "Earn it now."

After all, Miss Monahan, this graft of honesty they all preach so much about hasn't anything mysterious in it. All it is, is putting your wits to work according to the rules of the game and not against them. I was driven to it—the thought of big Tom crouching for a spring in the dark cell up yonder sent me whirling out into the thinking place, like the picture of the soul in the big book at Latimer's I read out of. And first thing you know, 'pon honor, Mag, it was as much fun planning how to "earn it now" as any lifting I ever schemed. It's getting the best of people that always charmed me—and here was a way to fool 'em according to law.

So busy I was making it all up, that the train pulled into the station before I knew it. I gave a last thought to that poor old hyena of a Tom, and then put him out of my mind. I had other fish to fry. Straight down to Mother Douty I went with my basket.

"A fool girl, mother, on her way up to Sing Sing, lost her basket, and Nance Olden found it; it ought to be worth a good deal."

She grinned. You couldn't make old Douty believe that the Lord himself wouldn't steal if He got a chance. And she knows the chances that come butting up against Nancy Olden.

Why did I lie to her? Not for practice, I assure you. She'd have beaten me down to the last cent if she thought it was mine, but she always thinks there'll be a find for her in something that's stolen. So I let her think I'd stolen it in the railway station, and we came to terms.

With what she gave me I bought a wig. Mag, I want you some day, when you can get off, to come and see that wig. I shouldn't wonder but you'd recognize it. It's red, of very coarse hair, but a wonderful color, and so long it—yes, it might be your own, Mag Monahan, it's so much like it. I went to the theater and got my Charity rig, took it home, and sat for hours there just looking at 'em both. When evening came I was ready to "earn it now."

You see, Obermuller had given me the whole day to be away, and neither Gray nor the other three Charities expected me back. I had to do it on the sly, you sassy Mag! Yes, it was partly because I love to cheat, but more because I was bound to have my chance once whether anybody else enjoyed it or not.

I came to the theater in my Charity rig and the wig. It looked as if I'd slept in it, and it came down to the draggled hem of the skirt. All the way there I walked like you, Mag. Once, when a newsboy grinned at me and shouted "Carrots!" I grinned back—your own, old Cruelty grin, Mag. I vow I felt so much like you—as you used to be—that when I lurched out on the stage at last, stumbling over my shoe laces and trying to push the hair out of my eyes, you'd have sworn it was little Mag Monahan I making her debut in the Cruelty room.

Oh, Mag, Mag, you darling Mag! Did you ever hear a whole house, a great big theater full of a peevish vaudeville audience, just rise at you, give one roar of laughter they hadn't expected at all to give, and then settle down to giggle at every move you made?

Girl alive, I just had 'em! They couldn't take their eyes off me. If I squirmed, they howled. If I stood on one foot, scratching the torn leg of my stocking with the other—you know, Mag!—they yelled. If I grinned, they just roared.

Oh, Mag, can't you see? Don't you understand? I was It. The center of the stage I carried round with me—it was just Nancy Olden. And for ten minutes Nancy had nothing to do but to play with 'em. 'Pon my life, Mag, it's just like stealing; the old graft exactly; it's so fascinating, so busy, and risky, except that they play the game with you and pay you and love you to fool 'em.

When the curtain fell it was different. Grays followed by the Charities, all clean and spick-and-span and—not in it; not even on the edge of it—stormed up to Obermuller standing at the wings.

"I'll quit the show here and now," she squawked. "It's a shame, a beastly shame. How dare you play me such a trick, Fred Obermuller? I never was treated so in my life—to have that dirty little wretch come tumbling on like that, without even so much as your telling me you'd made up all this new business for her! It's indecent, anyway. Why, I lost my cue. There was a gap for a full minute. The whole act was such a ghastly failure that I—"

"That you'd better go out now and make your prettiest bow, Gray. Phew! Listen to the house roar. That's what I call applause. Go on now."

She went.

Me? I didn't say a word. I looked at Obermuller and—and I just did like this. Yes, winked, Mag Monahan. I was so crazily happy I had to, didn't I?

But do you know what he did? Do you know what he did?

Well, I suppose I am screaming and the Troyons will put me out, but—he just—winked—back!

And then Gray came trailing back into the wings, and the shrieking and thumping and whistling out in front just went on—and on—and on—and on. Um! I just listened and loved it—every thump of it. And I stood there like a demure little kitten; or more like Mag Monahan after she'd had a good licking, and was good and quiet. And I never so much as budged till Obermuller said:

"Well, Nance, you have earned it. The gall of you! But it only proves that Fred Obermuller never yet bought a gold brick. Only, let me in on your racket next time. There, go on—take it. It's yours."

Oh, to have Fred Obermuller say things like that to you!

He gave me a bit of a push. 'Twas just a love-pat. I stumbled out on to the stage.

VII.

And that's why, Marguerite de Monahan, I want you to buy in with the madam here. Let 'em keep on calling it Troyon's as much as they want, but you're to be a partner on the money I'll give you. If this fairy story lasts, it'll be your own, Mag—a sort of commission you get on my take-off of you. But if anything happens to the world—if it should go crazy, or get sane, and not love Nancy Olden any more, why, here'll be a place for me, too.

Does it look that way? Divil a bit, you croaker! It looks—it looks—listen and I'll tell you how it looks.

It looks as though Gray and the great Gray rose diamond and the three Charities had all become a bit of background for Nance Olden to play upon.

It looks as though the audience likes the sound of my voice as much almost as I do myself; anyway, as much as it does the sight of me.

It looks as though the press, if you please, had discovered a new stage star, for down comes a little reporter to interview me—me, Nancy Olden! Think of that, Mag! I receive him all in my Charity rig, and in Obermuller's office, and he asks me silly questions and I tell him a lot of nonsense, but some truths, too, about the Cruelty. Fancy, he didn't know what the Cruelty was! S. P. C. C., he calls it. And all the time we talked a long-haired German artist he had brought with him was sketching Nance Olden in different poses. Isn't that the limit?

What d'ye think Tom Dorgan'd say to see half a page of Nancy Olden in the X-Ray? Wouldn't his eyes pop? Poor old Tom! ... No danger—they won't let him have the papers.... My old Tommy!

What is it, Mag? Oh, what was I saying? Yes—yes, how it looks.

Well, it looks as though the Trust—yes, the big and mighty T. T.—short for Theatrical Trust, you innocent—had heard of that same Nance Olden you read about in the papers. For one night last week, when I'd just come of and the house was yelling and shouting behind me, Obermuller meets me in the wings and trots me of to his private office.

"What for?" I asked him on the way.

"You'll find out in a minute. Come on."

I pulled up my stocking and followed. You know I wear it in that act without a garter, and it's always coming down the way yours used to, Mag. Even when it doesn't come down I pull it up, I'm so in the habit of doing it.

A little bit of a man, bald-headed, with a dyspeptic little black mustache turned down at the corners, watched me come in. He grinned at my make-up, and then at me.

"Clever little girl," he says through his nose. "How much do you stick Obermuller for?"

"Clever little man," say I, bold as brass and through my own nose; "none of your business."

"Hi—you, Olden!" roared Obermuller, as though I'd run away and he was trying to get the bit from between my teeth. "Answer the gentleman prettily. Don't you know a representative of the mighty T. T. when you see him? Can't you see the Syndicate aureole about his noble brow? This gentleman, Nance, is the great and only Max Tausig. He humbleth the exalted and uplifteth the lowly—or, if there's more money in it, he gives to him that hath and steals from him that hasn't, but would mighty well like to have. He has no conscience, no bowels, no heart. But he has got tin and nerve and power to beat the band. In short, and for all practical purposes for one in your profession, Nancy Olden, he's just God. Down on your knees and lick his boots—Trust gods wear boots, patent leathers—and thank him for permitting it, you lucky baggage!"

I looked at the little man; the angry red was just fading from the top of his cocoanut-shaped bald head.

"You always were a fool, Obermuller," he said cordially. "And you were always over-fond of your low-comedian jokes. If you hadn't been so smart with your tongue, you'd had more friends and not so many enemies in—"

"In the heavenly Syndicate, eh? Well, I have lived without—"

"You have lived, but—"

"But where do I expect to go when I die? Good theatrical managers, Nance, when they die as individuals go to Heaven—they get into the Trust. After that they just touch buttons; the Trust does the rest. Bad ones—the kickers—the Fred Obermullers go to—a place where salaries cease from troubling and royalties are at rest. It's a slow place where—where, in short, there's nothing doing. And only one thing's done—the kicker. It's that place Mr. Tausig thinks I'm bound for. And it's that place he's come to rescue you from, from sheer goodness of heart and a wary eye for all there's in it. Cinch him, Olden, for all the traffic will bear!"

I looked from one to the other—Obermuller, big and savage underneath all his gay talk, I knew him well enough to see that; the little man, his mouth turned down at the corners and a sneer in his eye for the fellow that wasn't clever enough to get in with the push.

"You must not give the young woman the big head, Obermuller. Her own is big enough, I'll bet, as it is. I ain't prepared to make any startling offer to a little girl that's just barely got her nose above the wall. The slightest shake might knock her off altogether, or she mightn't have strength enough in herself to hold on. But we'll give her a chance. And because of what it may lead to, if she works hard, because of the opportunities we can give her, there ain't so much in it in a money way as you might imagine."

Obermuller didn't say anything. His own lips and his own eyes sneered now, and he winked openly at me, which made the little man hot.

"Blast it!" he twanged. "I mean it. If you've got any notion through my coming down to your dirty little joint that we've set our hearts on having the girl, just get busy thinking something else. She may be worth something to you—measured up against the dubs you've got; but to us—"

"To you, it's not so much your not having her as my having her that—" "Exactly. It ain't our policy to leave any doubtful cards in the enemy's hands. He can have the bad ones. He couldn't get the good ones. And the doubtful ones, like this girl Olden—"

"Well, that's just where you're mistaken!" Obermuller thrust his hands deep in his pockets and put out that square chin of his like the fighter he is. "'This girl Olden' is anything but doubtful. She's a big card right now if she could be well handled. And the time isn't so far off when, if you get her, you people will be—"

"Just how much is your interest in her worth?" the little man sneered.

Obermuller glared at him, and in the pause I murmured demurely:

"Only a six-year contract."

Mag, you should have seen 'em jump—both of 'em; the little man with vexation, the big one with surprise.

A contract! Me?—Nance Olden! Why, Mag, you innocent, of course I hadn't. Managers don't give six-year contracts to girl—burglars who've never set foot on the stage.

When the little man was gone, Obermuller cornered me.

"What's your game, Olden?" he cried. "You're too deep for me; I throw up my hands. Come; what've you got in that smart little head of yours? Are you holding out for higher stakes? Do you expect him to buy that great six-year contract and divvy the proceeds with me? Because he will—when once they get their eye on you, they'll have you; and to turn up your nose at their offer if in just the way to make them itch for you. But how the deuce did you find it out? And where do you get your nerve from, anyway? A little beggar like you to refuse an offer from the T. T. and sit hatching your schemes on your little old 'steen dollars a week! ... It'll have to be twice 'steen, now, I suppose?"

"All right, just as you say," I laughed. "But why aren't you in the Trust, Fred Obermuller?"

"Why aren't you in society, Nance?"

"Um!—well, because society's prejudiced against lifting, but the Trust isn't. Do you know that's a great graft, Mr. Obermuller—lifting wholesale? Why don't you get in?"

"Because a Trust is a lot of sailors on a raft who keep their places by kicking off the drowning hands that clutch at it. Can you fancy a fellow like Tausig stooping down to help me tenderly on board to divide the pickings?"

"No, but I can fancy you grappling with him till he'd be glad to take you on rather than be pulled off himself."

"You'd be in with the push, would you, Olden, if you were managing?" he asked with a grin.

"I'd be at the top, wherever that was."

"Then why the deuce didn't you jump at Tausig's offer? Were you really crafty enough—"

"I am artiste, Monsieur Obermuller," I gutturaled like Mademoiselle Picotte, who dances on the wire. "I moost have about me those who arre—who arre congeniale—"

"You monkey!" he laughed. "Then, when Tausig comes to buy your contract—"

"We'll tell him to go to thunder."

He laughed. Say, Mag, that big fellow is like a boy when he's pleased. I guess that's what makes it such fun to please him.

"And I, who admired your business sagacity in holding off, Nance!" he said.

"I thought you admired my take-off! of Mademoiselle Picotte."

"Well?"

"Well, why don't you make use of it? Take me round to the theaters and let me mimic all the swell actors and actresses. I've got more chance with you than with that Trust gang. They wouldn't give me room to do my own stunt; they'd make me fit into theirs. But you—"

"But me! You think you can wind me round your finger?"

"Not—yet."

He chuckled. I thought I had him going. I saw Nance Olden spending her evenings at the big Broadway theaters, when, just at that minute, Ginger, the call-boy, burst in with a note.

Say, Mag, I wouldn't like to get that man Obermuller hopping mad at me, and Nancy Olden's no coward, either. But the way he gritted his teeth at that note and the devil in his eyes when he lifted them from it, made me wonder how I'd ever dared be facetious with him.

I got up to go. He'd forgotten me, but he looked up then.

"That was a great suggestion of yours, Olden, to put Lord Gray on to act himself—great!" His voice shook, he was so angry.

"Well!" I snapped. I wasn't going to let him see that a big man raging could bluff Nance Olden.

What did he mean? Why—just this: there was Lord Harold Gray, the real Lord behind the scenes, bringing the Lady who was really only a chorus girl to the show in his automobile; helping her dress like a maid; holding her box of jewels as he tagged after her like a big Newfoundland; smoking his one cigarette solemnly and admiringly while she was on the stage; poking after her like a tame bear. He's a funny fellow, that Lord Harold. He's a Tom Dorgan, with the brains and the graft and—and the brute, too, Mag, washed out of him; a Tom Dorgan that's been kept dressed in swagger clothes all his life and living at top-notch—a big, clean, handsome, stupid, good-natured, overgrown boy.

Yes, I'm coming to it. When I'd seen him go tagging after her chippy Ladyship behind the scenes long enough, I told Obermuller one day that it was absurd to send the mock Lady out on the boards and keep the live Lord hidden behind. He jumped at the idea, and they rigged up a little act for the two—the Lord and the Lady. Gray was furious when she heard of it—their making use of her Lord in such a way—but Lord Harold just swallowed his big Adam's apple with a gulp or two, and said:

"'Pon honor, it's a blawsted scheme, you know; but I'm jolly sure I'd make a bleddy ass of myself. I cawn't act, you know."

The ninny! You know he thinks Gray really can.

But Obermuller explained to him that he needn't act—just be himself out behind the wings, and lo! Lord Harold was "chawmed."

And Gray?

Why, she gave in at last; pretended to, anyway—sliding out of the Charity sketch, and rehearsing the thing with him, and all that. And—and do you know what she did, Mag? (Nance Olden may be pretty mean, but she wouldn't do a trick like that.) She waited till ten minutes before time for the thing to be put on and then threw a fit.

"She's so ill, her delicate Ladyship! So ill she just can't go on this evening! Wonder how long she thinks such an excuse will keep Lord Harold off when I want him on!" growled Obermuller, throwing her note over to me. He'd have liked to throw it at me if it'd been heavy enough to hurt; he was so thumping mad.

You see, there it was on the program:

THE CLEVER SKETCH ENTITLED

THEATRICAL ARISTOCRACY.

The Duke of Portmanteau .... Lord Harold Gray.
The Duchess ................ Lady Gray.

The celebrated Gray jewels, including the great Rose Diamond,
will be worn by Lady Gray in this number.

No wonder Obermuller was raging. I looked at him. You don't like to tackle a fellow like that when he's dancing hot. And yet you ache to help him and—yes, yourself.

"Lord Harold's here yet, and the jewels?" I asked.

He gave a short nod. He was thinking. But so was I.

"Then all he wants is a Lady?"

"That's all," he said sarcastically.

"Well, what's the matter with me?"

He gasped.

"There's nothing the matter with your nerve, Olden."

"Thank you, so much." It was the way Gray says it when she tries to have an English accent. "Dress me up, Fred Obermuller, in Gray's new silk gown and the Gray jewels, and you'd never—"

"I'd never set eyes on you again."

"You'd never know, if you were in the audience, that it wasn't Gray herself. I can take her off to the life, and if the prompter'll stand by—"

He looked at me for a full minute.

"Try it, Olden," he said.

I did. I flew to Gray's dressing-room. She'd gone home deathly ill, of course. They gave me the best seamstress in the place. She let out the waist a bit and pulled over the lace to cover it. I got into that mass of silk and lace—oh, silk on silk, and Nance Olden inside! Beryl Blackburn did my hair, and Grace Weston put on my slippers. Topham, himself, hung me with those gorgeous shining diamonds and pearls and emeralds, till I felt like an idol loaded with booty. There were so many standing round me, rigging me up, that I didn't get a glimpse of the mirror till the second before Ginger called me. But in that second—in that second, Mag Monahan, I saw a fairy with blazing cheeks and shining eyes, with a diamond coronet in her brown hair, puffed high, and pearls on her bare neck and arms, and emeralds over the waist, and rubies and pearls on her fingers, and sprays of diamonds like frost on the lace of her skirt, and diamond buckles on her very slippers, and the rose diamond, like a sun, outshining all the rest; and—and, Mag, it was me!

How did it go? Well, wouldn't it make you think you were a Lady, sure enough, if you couldn't move without that lace train billowing after you; without being dazzled with diamond-shine; without a truly Lord tagging after you?

He kept his head, Lord Harold did—even if it is a mutton-head. That helped me at first. He was so cold, so stupid, so slow, so good-tempered—so just himself. And after the first plunge—

I tell you, Mag Monahan, there's one thing that's stronger than wine to a woman—it's being beautiful. Oh! And I was beautiful. I knew it before I got that quick hush, with the full applause after it. And because I was beautiful, I got saucy, and then calm, and then I caught Fred Obermuller's voice—he had taken the book from the prompter and stood there himself—and after that it was easy sailing.

He was there yet when the act was over, and I trailed out, followed by my Lord. He let the prompt-book fall from his hands and reached them both out to me.

I flirted my jeweled fan at him and swept him a courtesy.

Cool? No, I wasn't. Not a bit of it. He was daffy with the sight of me in all that glory, and I knew it.

"Nance," he whispered, "you wonderful girl, if I didn't know about that little thief up at the Bronsonia I'd—I'd marry you alive, just for the fun of piling pretty things on you."

"The deuce you would!" I sailed past him, with Topham and my Lord in my wake.

They didn't leave me till they'd stripped me clean. I felt like a Christmas tree the day after. But, somehow, I didn't care.

VIII.

Is that you, Mag? Well, it's about time you came home to look after me. Fine chaperon you make, Miss Monahan! Why, didn't I tell you the very day we took this flat what a chaperon was, and that you'd have to be mine? Imagine Nancy Olden without a chaperon—Shocking!

No, 'tisn't late. Sit down, Maggie, there, and let me get the stool and talk to you. Think of us two—Cruelty girls, both of us—two mangy kittens deserted by the old cats in a city's alleys, and left mewing with cold and hunger and dirt, out in the wet—think of us two in our own flat, Mag!

I say, it makes me proud of us! There are times when I look at every stick of furniture we own, and I try to pretend to it all that I'm used to a decent roof over my head, and a dining-room, kitchen, parlor, bedroom and bath. Oh, and I forgot the telephone the other tenant left here till its lease is up. But at other times I stand here in the middle of it and cry out to it, in my heart:

"Look at me, Nancy Olden, a householder, a rent-payer, the head of the family, even if it's only a family of two and the other one Mag! Look at me, with my name in the directory, a-paying milk bills and meat bills and bread bills! Look at me with a place of my own, where nobody's right's greater than my own; where no one has a right but me and Mag; a place where—where there's nothing to hide from the police!"

There's the rub, Mag, as Hamlet says—(I went to see it the other night, so that I could take off the Ophelia—she used to be a good mimic herself, before she tried to be a leading lady.) It spoils you, this sense of safeness that goes with the honesty graft. You lose the quickness of the hunter and the nerve of the hunted. And—worse—you lose your taste for the old risky life. You grow proud and fat, and you love every stick in the dear, quiet little place that's your home—your own home. You love it so that you'd be ashamed to sneak round where it could see you—you who'd always walked upright before it with the step of the mistress; with nothing in the world to be ashamed of; nothing to prevent your staring each honest dish-pan in the face!

And, Mag, you try—if you're me—to fit Tom Dorgan in here—Tom Dorgan in stripes and savage sulks still—all these months—kept away from the world, even the world behind bars! Maggie, don't you wish Tom was a ventriloquist or—or an acrobat or—but this isn't what I had to tell you.

Do you know what a society entertainer is, Miss Monahan? No? Well, look at me. Yes, I'm one. Miss Nance Olden, whose services are worth fifty dollars a night—at least, they were one night.

Ginger brought me the note that made me a society entertainer. It was from a Mrs. Paul B. Gates, who had been "charmed by your clever impersonations, Miss Olden, and write to know if you have the leisure to entertain some friends at my house on Thursday of this week."

Had I the leisure—well, rather! I showed the note to Gray, just to make her jealous. (Oh, yes, she goes on all right in the act with Lord Harold every night. Catch her letting me wear those things of hers twice!) Well, she just turned up her nose.

"Of course, you won't accept?" she said.

"Of course, I will."

"Oh! I only thought you'd feel as I should about appearing before a lot of snobs, who'll treat you like a servant and—"

"Who'll do nothing of the sort and who'll pay you well for it," put in Obermuller. He had come up and was reading the note I had handed to him. "You just say yes, Nance," he went on, after Gray had bounced of to her dressing-room. "It isn't such a bad graft and—and this is just between us two, mind—that little beggar, Tausig, has begun his tricks since you turned his offer down. They can make things hot for me, and if they do, it won't be so bad for you to go in for this sort of thing—unless you go over to the Trust—"

I shook my head.

"Well, this thing will be an ad for you, besides,—if the papers can be got to notice it. They're coy with their notices, confound them, since Tausig let them know that big Trust ads don't appear in the same papers that boom anti-Trust shows!"

"How long are you going to stand it, Mr. O?"

"Just as long as I can't help myself; not a minute longer."

"There ought to be a way—some way—"

"Yes, there ought, but there isn't. They've got things down to a fine point, and the fellow they don't fear has got to fear them.... I'll put your number early to-night, so that you can get off by nine. Good luck, Nance."

At nine, then, behold Nancy Olden in her white muslin dress, long-sleeved and high-necked, and just to her shoe-tops, with a big white muslin sash around her waist. Oh, she's no baby, is Nance, but she looks like one in this rig with her short hair—or rather, like a school-girl; which makes the stunts she does in mimicking the corkers of the profession all the more surprising.

"We're just a little party," said Mrs. Paul Gates, coming into the bedroom where I was taking of my wraps. "And I'm so glad you could come, for my principal guest, Mr. Latimer, is an invalid, who used to love the theaters, but hasn't been to one since his attack many years ago. I count on your giving him, in a way, a condensed history in action of what is going on on the stage."

I told her I would. But I didn't just know what I was saying. Think of Latimer there, Maggie, and think of our last meeting! It made me tremble. Not that I fancied for a moment he'd betray me. The man that helps you twice don't hurt you the third time. No, it wasn't that; it was only that I longed to do well—well before him, so that—

And then I found myself in an alcove off the parlors, separated from them by heavy curtains. It was such a pretty little red bower. Right behind me was the red of the Turkish drapery of a cozy corner, and just as I took my place under the great chandelier, the servants pulled the curtains apart and the lights went out in the parlors.

In that minute I got it, Mag—yes, stage fright. Got it bad. I suppose it was coming to me, but Lordy! I hadn't ever known before what it was. I could see the black of the men's clothes in the long parlors in front of me, and the white of the women's necks and arms. There were soft ends of talk trailing after the first silence, and everything was so strange that I seemed to hear two men's voices which sounded familiar—Latimer's silken voice, and another, a heavy, coarse bass, that was the last to be quieted.

I fancied that when that last voice should stop I could begin, but all at once my mind seemed to turn a somersault, and, instead of looking out upon them, I seemed to be looking in on myself—to see a white-faced little girl in a white dress, standing alone under a blaze of light in a glare of red, gazing fearfully at this queer, new audience.

Fail? Me? Not Nancy, Maggie. I just took me by the shoulders.

"Nancy Olden, you little thief!" I cried to me inside of me. "How dare you! I'd rather you'd steal the silver on this woman's dressing-table than cheat her out of what she expects and what's coming to her."

Nance really didn't dare. So she began.

The first one was bad. I gave 'em Duse's Francesca. You've never heard the wailing music in that woman's voice when she says:

"There is no escape, Smaragdi.
You have said it;
The shadow is a glass to me, and God
Lets me be lost."

I gave them Duse just to show them how swell I was myself; which shows what a ninny I was. The thing the world loves is the opposite of what it is. The pat-pat-pat of their gloves came in to me when I got through. They were too polite to hiss. But it wasn't necessary. I was hissing myself. Inside of me there was a long, nasty hiss-ss-ss!

I couldn't bear it. I couldn't bear to be a failure with Latimer listening, though out there in that queer half-light I couldn't see him at all, but could only make out the couch where I knew he must be lying.

I just jumped into something else to retrieve myself. I can do Carter's Du Barry to the Queen's taste, Maggie. That rotten voice of hers, like Mother Douty's, but stronger and surer; that rocky old face pretending to look young and beautiful inside that talented red hair of hers; that whining "Denny! Denny!" she squawks out every other minute. Oh, I can do Du Barry all right!

They thought I could, too, those black and white shadows out there on the other side of the velvet curtains. But I cared less for what they thought than for the fact that I had drowned that sputtering hiss-ss-ss inside of me, and that Latimer was among them.

I gave them Warfield, then; I was always good at taking off the sheenies in the alley behind the Cruelty—remember? I gave them that little pinch-nosed Maude Adams, and dry, corking little Mrs. Fiske, and Henry Miller when he smooths down his white breeches lovingly and sings Sally in our Alley, and strutting old Mansfield, and—

Say, isn't it funny, Mag, that I've seen 'em all and know all they can do? They've been my college education, that crowd. Not a bad one, either, when you come to think of what I wanted from it.

They pulled the curtains down at the end and I went back to the bedroom. I had my hat and jacket on when Mrs. Gates and some of the younger ladies came to see me there, but I caught no glimpse of Latimer. You'd think—wouldn't you—that he'd have made an opportunity to say just one nice word to me in that easy, soft voice of his? I tried to believe that perhaps he hadn't really seen me, lying down, as he must have been, or that he hadn't recognized me, but I knew that I couldn't make myself believe that; and the lack of just that word from him spoiled all my satisfaction with myself, and I walked out with Mrs. Gates through the hall and past the dining-room feeling as hurt as though I'd deserved that a man like Latimer should notice me.

The dining-room was all lighted, but empty—the colored, shaded candlesticks glowing down on the cut glass and silver, on delicate china and flowers. The ladies and gentlemen hadn't come out to supper yet; at least, only one was there. He was standing with his back to me, before the sideboard, pouring out a glass of something from a decanter. He turned at the rustle of my starched skirt, and, as I passed the door, he saw me. I saw him, too, and hurried away.

Yes, I knew him. Just you wait.

I got home here earlier than I'd expected, and I'd just got off my hat and jacket and put away that snug little check when there came a ring at the bell.

I thought it was you, Mag—that you'd forgotten your key. I was so sure of it that I pulled the door open wide with a flourish and—

And admitted—Edward!

Yes, Edward, husband of the Dowager. The same red-faced, big-necked old fellow, husky-voiced with whisky now, just as he was before. He must have been keeping it up steadily ever since the day out in the country when Tom lifted his watch. It'll take more than one lost watch to cure Edward.

"I—followed you home, Miss Murieson," he said, grabbing me by the hand and pushing the door closed behind him. "Or is it Miss Murieson? Which is your stage name, and which your real one? And have you really learned to remember it? For my part, any old name will smell as sweet, now that I'm close to the rose."

I jerked my hand away from him.

"I didn't ask you to call," I said, haughty as the Dowager herself was when first I saw her in her gorgeous parlor, the Bishop's card in her hand.

"No, I noticed that," he roared jovially. "You skinned out the front door the moment you saw me. All that was left to me was to skin after."

"Why?"

"Why!" He slapped his leg as though he'd heard the best joke in the world. "To renew our acquaintance, of course. To ask you if you wouldn't like me to buy you a red coat and hat like the one you left behind you that day over in Philadelphia, when you cut your visit so short. To insist upon my privilege of relationship. To call that wink you gave me in the hall that day, you little devil. Now, don't look at me like that. I say, let's be friends; won't you?"

"Not for a red coat trimmed with chinchilla," I cried.

He got between me and the door.

"Prices gone up?" he inquired pleasantly. "Who's bulling the stock?"

"Never you mind, so long as his name isn't Ramsay."

"But why shouldn't his name be Ramsay?" he cooed.

"Just because it isn't. I'm expecting a friend. Hadn't you better go home to Mrs. Dowager Diamonds?"

"Bully! Is that what you call her? No, I'll stay and meet your friend."

"Better not."

"Oh, I'm not afraid. Does he know as much about you as I do?"

"More."

"About your weakness for other girls' coats?"

"Yes."

You do know it all, don't you? And yet you care for me, Maggie Monahan!

I retreated before him into the dining-room. What in the world to do to get rid of him!

"I think you'd better go home, Mr. Ramsay," I said again, decidedly. "If you don't, I'll have to call the janitor to put you out."

"Call, sweetheart. He'll put you out with me; for I'll tell him a thing or two about you, and we'll go and find a better place than this. Stock can't be quoted so high, after all, if this is the best prospectus your friend can put up.... Why don't you call?"

I looked at him. I was thinking.

"Well?" he demanded.

"I've changed my mind."

Oh, Mag, Mag, did you ever see the man—ugly as a cannibal he may be and old as the cannibal's great-grandfather—that couldn't be persuaded he was a lady-killer?

His manner changed altogether. He plumped down on the lounge and patted the place beside him invitingly, giving me a wink that was deadly.

"But, Mrs. Dowager!" I exclaimed coquettishly.

"Oh, that's all right, little one! She hasn't even missed me yet. When she's playing Bridge she forgets even to be jealous."

"Playing Bridge," I murmured sweetly, "'way off in Philadelphia, while you, you naughty man—"

Oh, he loved that!

"Not so naughty as—as I'd like to be," he bellowed, heavily witty. "And she isn't 'way off in Philadelphia either. She's just round the corner at Mrs. Gates', and—what's the matter?"

"Nothing—nothing. Did she recognize me?"

"Oh, that's what scared you, is it? She didn't recognize you. Neither did I, till I got that second glimpse of you with your hat and jacket on. But even if she had—ho! ho! ho! I say; do you know, you couldn't convince the Bishop and Henrietta, if you'd talk till doomsday, that that red coat and hat we advertised weren't taken by a little girl that was daffy. Fact; I swear it! They admit you took the coat, you little witch, but it was when you were out of your mind—of course—of course! 'The very fact that she left the coat behind her and took nothing else from the house shows a mind diseased,' insisted Henrietta. Of course—of course! 'And her coming for no reason at all to your house,' adds the Bishop.... Say, what was the reason?"

Maggie, I'll tell you a hard thing: it isn't when people think worse of you than you are, but better, that you feel most uncomfortable. I got pale and sick inside of me at the thought of my poor little Bishop. I loved him for believing me straight and—

"I've been dying of curiosity to know what was in your wise little head that day," he went on. "Oh, it was wise all right; that wink you gave me was perfectly sane; there was method in that madness of yours."

"I will tell you, Mr. Ramsay," I said sweetly, "at supper."

"Supper!"

"Yes, the supper you're going to get for me."

His bellowing laughter filled the place. Maggie, our little flat and our few things don't go well with sounds like that.

"Oh, you're all alike, you women!" he roared. "All right, supper it is. Where shall we go—Rector's?"

I pouted.

"It's so much more cozy right here," I said. "I'll telephone. There's Brophy's, just round the corner, and they send in the loveliest things."

"Oh, they do! Well, tell 'em to begin sending."

I thought he'd follow me out in the hall to the 'phone, but he was having some trouble in pulling out his purse—to count out his money, I suppose. I got Central and asked for the number. Oh, yes, I knew it all right; I had called up that same number once, already, to-day. Brophy's? Why, Maggie Monahan, you ought to know there's no Brophy's. At least none that I ever heard about.

With my hand over the mouthpiece, so that nobody heard but Edward, I ordered a supper fit for a king—or a chorus girl! What didn't I order! Champagne, broiled lobster, crab meat, stuffed pimentoes, kirschkaffee—everything I'd ever heard Beryl Blackburn tell about.

"Say, say," interrupted Edward, coming out after me. "That's enough of that stuff. Tell him to send in a Scotch and soda and—what—"

For at that moment the connection was made and I cut in sweetly with:

"Mrs. Edward Ramsay?—just a minute."

Mag, you should have seen the man's face! It was red, it was white; it was furious, it was frightened.

I put my hand a moment over the mouthpiece and turned on him then. "I've got her on the 'phone at Mrs. Gates' house. Shall I tell your wife where you are, Edward? ... Just a moment, Mrs. Ramsay, hold the wire; some one wants to speak with you."

"You little devil!" His voice was thick with rage.

"Yes, you called me that some time ago, but not in that tone. Quick, now—the door or ... Waiting, Mrs. Ramsay?"

He moved toward the door.

"How'll I know you won't tell her when I'm gone?" he growled.

"Merely by my saying that I won't," I answered curtly. "You're in no position to dictate terms; I am."

But I could, without leaving the 'phone, latch the chain on the door behind him, leaving it half open. So he must have heard the rest.

"Yes, Mrs. Ramsay, waiting?" I croaked like the driest kind of hello-girl. "I was mistaken. It was a message left to be delivered to you—not some one wanting to speak with you. Who am I? Why, this is Central. Here is the message: 'Will be with you in half an hour.' Signed 'Edward.' ... Yes, that's right. Thank you. Good night."

I hung up, gave the door a touch that shut it in his face and went back into the dining-room to throw open the windows. The place smelled of alcohol; the moral atmosphere left behind by that bad old man sickened me.

I leaned out and looked at the stars and tried to think of something sweet and wholesome and strengthening.

"Ah, Nance," I cried to myself with a sob—I had pretended to take it lightly enough when he was here, but now—"if you had heard of a girl who, like yourself this evening, unexpectedly met two men she had known, and the good man ignored her and the bad one followed her—oh, Nancy—what sort of girl would you think she was at heart? What sort of hope could you imagine her treasuring for her own future? And what sort of significance would you attach to—"

And just then the bell rang again.

This time I was sure it was you. And, O Maggie, I ran to the door eager for the touch of your hand and the look in your eyes. I was afraid to be alone with my own thoughts. I was afraid of the conclusion to which they were leading me. Maggie, if ever a girl needed comfort and encouragement and heartening, I did then.

And I got it, dear.

For there was a man at the door, with a great basket of azaleas—pale, pink earth-stars they are, the sweet, innocent things—and a letter for me. Here it is. Let me read it to you.

"My dear Miss Omar:

Once on a time there was a Luckless Pot, marred in the making, that had the luck to be of service to a Pipkin.

It was a saucy Pipkin, though a very winning one, and it had all the health and strength the poor Pot lacked—physically. Morally—morally, that young Pipkin was in a most unwholesome condition. Already its fair, smooth surface was scratched and fouled. It was unmindful of the treasure of good it contained, and its responsibility to keep that good intact. And it seemed destined to crash itself to pieces among pots of baser metal.

What the Luckless Pot did was little—being ignorant of the art by which diamonds may be attained easily and honestly—but it gave the little Pipkin a chance.

What the Pipkin did with that chance the Pot learned to-night, with such pleasure and satisfaction as made it impossible for him not to share it with her. So while he sent Burnett out to the conservatory to cut azaleas, he wrote her a note to try to convey to her what he felt when, in that nicely polished, neatly decorated and self-respecting Vessel on exhibition in Mrs. Gates' red room, he recognized the poor little Pipkin of other days.

The Pot, as you know, was a sort of stranded bit of clay that had never filled the use for which pots are created. He had little human to interest him. The fate of the Pipkin, therefore, he had often pondered on; and, in spite of improbabilities, had had faith in a certain quality of brave sincerity the little thing showed; a quality that shone through acquired faults like a star in a murky sky.

This justification of his faith in the Pipkin may seem a small matter to make so much of. And yet the Pot—that sleeps not well o' nights, as is the case with damaged pots—will take to bed with him to-night a pretty, pleasant thought due just to this.

But do not think the Pot an idealist. If he were, he might have been tempted to mistake the Pipkin for a statelier, more pretentious Vessel—a Vase, say, all graceful curves and embossed sides, but shallow, perhaps, possibly lacking breadth. No, the Pipkin is a pipkin, made of common clay—even though it has the uncommon sweetness and strength to overcome the tendencies of clay—and fashioned for those common uses of life, deprivation of which to anything that comes from the Potter's hands is the most enduring, the most uncommon sorrow.

O pretty little Pipkin, thank the Potter, who made you as you are, as you will be—a thing that can cheer and stay men's souls by ministering to the human needs of them. For you, be sure, the Potter's 'a good fellow and 'twill all be well.'

For the Pot—he sails shortly, or rather, he is to be carted abroad by some optimistic friends whose hopes he does not share—to a celebrated repair shop for damaged pots. Whether he shall return, patched and mended into temporary semblance of a useful Vessel; whether he shall continue to be merely the same old Luckless Pot, or whether he shall return at all, O Pipkin, does not matter much.

But it has been well that, before we two behind the veil had passed, we met again, and you left me such a fragrant memory.

LATIMER."

O Maggie, Maggie, some day I hope to see that man and tell him how sorely the Pipkin needed the Pot's letter!

IX.

It's all come so quick, Maggie, and it was over so soon that I hardly remember the beginning.

Nobody on earth could have expected it less than I, when I came off in the afternoon. I don't know what I was thinking of as I came into my dressing-room, that used to be Gray's—the sight of him seemed to cut me off from myself as with a knife—but it wasn't of him.

It may have been that I was chuckling to myself at the thought of Nancy Olden with a dressing-room all to herself. I can't ever quite get used to that, you know, though I sail around there with all the airs of the leading lady. Sometimes I see a twinkle in Fred Obermuller's eye when I catch him watching me, and goodness knows he's been glum enough of late, but it wasn't—

Yes, I'm going to tell you, but—it's rattled me a bit, Maggie. I'm so—so sorry, and a little—oh, just a little, little bit glad!

I'd slammed the door behind me—the old place is out of repair and the door won't shut except with a bang—and I had just squatted down on the floor to unbutton my high shoes, when I noticed the chintz curtains in front of the high dressing-box waver. They must have moved just like that when I was behind them months—it seems years—ago. But, you see, Topham had never served an apprenticeship behind curtains, so he didn't suspect.

"Lordy, Nancy," I laughed to myself, "some one thinks you've got a rose diamond and—"

And at that moment he parted the curtains and came out.

Yes—Tom—Tom Dorgan.

My heart came beating up to my throat and then, just as I thought I should choke, it slid down to my boots, sickening me. I didn't say a word. I sat there, my foot in my lap, staring at him.

Oh, Maggie-girl, it isn't good to get your first glimpse after all these months of the man you love crouched like a big bull in a small space, poking his close-cropped black head out like a turtle that's not sure something won't be thrown at it, and then dragging his big bulk out and standing over you. He used to be trim—Tom—and taut, but in those shapeless things, the old trousers, the dirty white shirt, and the vest too big for him—

"Well," he said, "why don't you say something?"