"Nance!" Mac demanded, with quick concern, "you surely aren't crying? Why the very idea! It makes me perfectly miserable to see girls cry. You mustn't, you know. Look at me, Nance! Smile at me this minute!"

But Nance's head was down on her desk, and she was past smiling.

"I'll do anything you say!" cried Mac, dropping on his knees beside her. "I'll 'fess up to the governor. I'll go on the water-wagon. I'll cut out the races. I'll be a regular little tin god if you'll only promise to be good to me."

"Good to you nothing!" said Nance, savagely, lifting a tear-stained, earnest face. "What right have I got to be anything to you? Haven't I been letting you spend the money on me that wasn't yours? I've been as bad as you have, every bit."

"Oh, rot!" said Mac, hotly. "You've been an angel. There isn't another girl in the world that's as much fun as you are and yet on the square every minute."

"It isn't on the square!" contradicted Nance, twisting her wet handkerchief into a ball. "Sneaking around corners and doing things on the sly. I am ashamed to tell you where I live, or who my people are, and you are ashamed to have your family know you are going with me. Whenever I look at your father and see him worrying about you, or think of your mother—"

"Yes, you think of everybody but me. You hold me at arm's length and knock on me and say things to me that nobody else would dare to say! And the worse you treat me, the more I want to take you in my arms and run away with you. Can't you love me a little, Nance? Please!"

He was close to her, with his ardent face on a level with hers. He was never more irresistible than when he wanted something, especially a forbidden something, and in the course of his twenty-one years he had never wanted anything so much as he wanted Nance Molloy.

She caught her breath and looked away. It was very hard to say what she intended, with him so close to her. His eloquent eyes, his tremulous lips were very disconcerting.

"Mr. Mac," she whispered intently, "why don't you tell your father everything, and promise him some of the things you been promising me? Why don't you make a clean start and behave yourself and stop giving 'em all this trouble?"

"And if I do, Nance? Suppose I do it for you, what then?"

For a long moment their eyes held each other. These two young, undisciplined creatures who had started life at opposite ends of the social ladder, one climbing up and the other climbing down, had met midway, and the fate of each trembled in the balance.

"And if I do?" Mac persisted, hardly above his breath.

Nance's eyelids fluttered ever so slightly, and the next instant, Mac had crushed her to him and smothered her protests in a passion of kisses.



CHAPTER XXVI

BETWEEN TWO FIRES

When Mr. Clarke returned from luncheon, it was evident that he was in no mood to encourage a prodigal's repentance. For half an hour Nance heard his voice rising and falling in angry accusation; then a door slammed, and there was silence. She waited tensely for the next sound, but it was long in coming. Presently some one began talking over the telephone in low, guarded tones, and she could not be sure which of the two it was. Then the talking ceased; the hall door of the inner office opened and closed quietly.

Nance went to the window and saw Mac emerge from the passage below and hurry across the yard to the stables. His cap was over his eyes, and his hands were deep in his pockets. Evidently he had had it out with his father and was going to stay over and meet his difficulties. Her eyes grew tender as she watched him. What a spoiled boy he was, in spite of his five feet eleven! Always getting into scrapes and letting other people get him out! But he was going to face the music this time, and he was doing it for her! If only she hadn't let him kiss her! A wave of shame made her bury her hot cheeks in her palms.

She was startled from her reverie by a noise at the door. It was Dan Lewis, looking strangely worried and preoccupied.

"Hello, Nance," he said, without lifting his eyes. "Did Mr. Clarke leave a telegram for me?"

"Not with me. Perhaps it is on his table. Want me to see?"

"No, I'll look," Dan answered and went in and closed the door behind him.

Nance looked at the closed door in sudden apprehension. What was the matter with Dan? What had he found out? She heard him moving about in the empty room; then she heard him talking over the telephone. When he came out, he crossed over to where she was sitting.

"Nance," he began, still with that uneasy manner, "there's something I've got to speak to you about. You won't take it amiss?"

"Cut loose," said Nance, with an attempt at lightness, but her heart began to thump uncomfortably.

"You see," Dan began laboriously. "I'm sort of worried by some talk that's been going on 'round the factory lately. It hadn't come direct to me until to-day, but I got wind of it every now and then. I know it's not true, but it mustn't go on. There's one way to stop it. Do you know what it is?"

Nance shook her head, and he went on.

"You and I have been making a mess of things lately. Maybe it's been my fault, I don't know. You see a fellow gets to know a lot of things a nice girl don't know. And the carnival ball business—well—I was scared for you, Nance, and that's the plain truth."

"I know, Dan," she said impatiently. "I was a fool to go that time, but I never did it again."

Dan fingered the papers on the desk.

"I ain't going to rag about that any more. But I can't have 'em saying things about you around the factory. You know how I feel about you—how I always have felt—Nance I want you to marry me."

Nance flashed a look at him, questioning, eager, uncertain; then her eyes fell. How could she know that behind his halting sentences a paean of love was threatening to burst the very confines of his inarticulate soul? She only saw an awkward young workman in his shirt sleeves, with a smudge across his cheek and a wistful look in his eyes, who knew no more about making love than he knew about the other graces of life.

"I've saved enough money," he went on earnestly, "to buy a little house in the country somewhere. That's what you wanted, wasn't it?"

Nance's glance wandered to the tall gas-pipe that had been their unromantic trysting place. Then she closed her eyes and pressed her fingers against them to keep back the stinging tears. If Dan loved her, why didn't he say beautiful things to her, why didn't he take her in his arms as Mac had done, and kiss away all those fears of herself and of the future that crowded upon her? With her head on his shoulder she could have sobbed out her whole confession and been comforted, but now—

"You care for me, don't you, Nance?" Dan asked with a sharp note of anxiety in his voice.

"Of course I care!" she said irritably. "But I don't want to get married and settle down. I want to get out and see the world. When you talk about a quiet little house in the country, I want to smash every window in it!"

Dan slipped the worn drawing he had in his hand back into his pocket. It was no time to discuss honeysuckle porches.

"We don't have to go to the country," he said patiently. "I just thought it was what you wanted. We can stay here, or we can go to another town if you like. All I want is to make you happy, Nance."

For a moment she sat with her chin on her palms, staring straight ahead; then she turned toward him with sudden resolution.

"What's the talk you been hearing about me?" she demanded.

"There's no use going into that," he said. "It's a lie, and I mean to stamp it out if I have to lick every man in the factory to do it."

"Was it—about Mac Clarke?"

"Who dared bring it to you?" he asked fiercely.

"What are they saying, Dan?"

"That you been seen out with him on the street, that you ride with him after night, and that he comes down here every day at the noon hour to see you."

"Is that all?"

"Ain't it enough?"

"Well, it's true!" said Nance, defiantly. "Every word of it. If anybody can find any real harm in what I've done, they are welcome to it!"

"It's true?" gasped Dan, his hands gripping a chair-back. "And you never told me? Has he—has he made love to you, Nance?"

"Why, he makes love to everybody. He makes love to his mother when he wants to get something out of her. What he says goes in one ear and out the other with me. But I like him and I ain't ashamed to say so. He's give me the best time I ever had in my life, and you bet I don't forget it."

"Will you answer me one thing more?" demanded Dan, sternly.

"Yes; I ain't afraid to answer any question you can ask."

"Was it Clarke that took you to the carnival ball?"

"Him and a fellow named Monte Pearce."

"Just you three?"

"No; Birdie Smelts was along."

Dan brushed his hand across his brow as if trying to recall something.

"Birdie come here that day," he said slowly. "She wanted to see Clarke for a friend of hers. Nance did he—did he ever ask you to kiss him?"

"Yes."

Dan groaned.

"Why didn't you tell me all this before, Nance? Why didn't you give me a chance to put you on your guard?"

"I was on my guard!" she cried, with rising anger. "I don't need anybody to take care of me!"

But Dan was too absorbed in his own thoughts to heed her.

"It's a good thing he's going away in a couple of days," he said grimly. "If ever the blackguard writes to you, or dares to speak to you again—"

Nance had risen and was facing him.

"Who's to stop him?" she asked furiously. "I'm the one to say the word, and not you!"

"And you won't let me take it up with him?"

"No!"

"And you mean to see him again, and to write to him?"

Nance had a blurred vision of an unhappy prodigal crossing the factory yard. He had kept his part of their compact; she must keep hers.

"I will if I want to," she said rather weakly.

Dan's face flushed crimson.

"All right," he said, "keep it up if you like. But I tell you now, I ain't going to stay here to see it. I'm going to clear out!"

He turned toward the door, and she called after him anxiously:

"Dan, come back here this minute. Where are you going?"

He paused in the doorway, his jaw set and a steady light in his eyes.

"I am going now," he said, "to apologize to the man I hit yesterday for telling the truth about you!"

That night Nance shed more tears than she had ever shed in the whole course of her life before; but whether she wept for Mac, or Dan, or for herself, she could not have said. She heard the sounds die out of the alley one by one, the clanging cars at the end of the street became less frequent; only the drip, drip, drip from a broken gutter outside her window, and the rats in the wall kept her company. All day Sunday she stayed in-doors, and came to the office on Monday pale and a bit listless.

Early as it was, Mr. Clarke was there before her, pacing the floor in evident perturbation.

"Come in here a moment, Miss Molloy," he said, before she had taken off her hat. "I want a word with you."

Nance followed him into the inner room with a quaking heart.

"I want you to tell me," he said, waiving all preliminaries, "just who was in this room Saturday afternoon after I left."

"Dan Lewis. And of course, Mr. Mac. You left him here."

"Who else?"

"Nobody."

"But there must have been," insisted Mr. Clarke, vehemently. "A man, giving my name, called up our retail store between two and two-thirty o'clock, and asked if they could cash a check for several hundred dollars. He said it was too late to go to the bank, and he wanted the money right away. Later a messenger brought my individual check, torn out of this check-book, which evidently hasn't been off my desk, and received the money. The cashier thought the signature looked queer and called me up yesterday. I intend to leave no stone unturned until I get at the truth of the matter. You were the only person here all afternoon. Tell me, in detail, exactly what happened."

Nance recalled as nearly as she could, the incidents of the afternoon, with careful circuits around her own interviews with Mac and Dan.

"Could any one have entered the inner office between their visits, without your knowing it?" asked Mr. Clarke, who was following her closely.

"Oh, yes, sir; only there wasn't time. You see Mr. Mac was just going out the factory yard as Dan come in here."

"Did either of them use my telephone?"

"Both of them used it."

"Could you hear what was said?"

"No; the door was shut both times."

"Did Lewis enter through the other room, or through the hall?"

"He come through the other room and asked me if you had left a telegram for him."

"Then he came in here?"

"Yes, sir."

Mr. Clarke's brows were knitted in perplexity. He took up the telephone.

"Send Lewis up here to my office," he directed. "What? Hasn't come in yet?" he repeated incredulously. "That's strange," he said grimly, half to himself. "The first time I ever knew him to be late."

Something seemed to tighten suddenly about Nance's heart. Could it be possible that Mr. Clarke was suspecting Dan of signing that check? She watched his nervous hands as they ran over the morning mail. He had singled out one letter and, as he finished reading it, he handed it to her.

It was from Dan, a brief business-like resignation, expressing appreciation of Mr. Clarke's kindness, regret at the suddenness of his departure, and giving as his reason private affairs that took him permanently to another city.

When Nance lifted her startled eyes from the signature, she saw that Mr. Clarke was closely scrutinizing the writing on the envelope.

"It's incredible!" he said, "and yet the circumstances are most suspicious. He gives no real reason for leaving."

"I can," said Nance, resolutely. "He wanted me to marry him, and I wouldn't promise. He asked me Saturday afternoon, after he come out of here. We had a quarrel, and he said he was going away; but I didn't believe it."

"Did he ask you to go away with him? Out of town anywhere?"

"Yes; he said he would go anywhere I said."

A flash of anger burnt out the look of fear that had been lurking in Mr. Clarke's face.

"He's the last man I would have suspected! Of course I knew he had been in a reformatory at one time, but—"

The band that had been tightening around Nance's heart seemed suddenly to burst. She sprang to her feet and stood confronting him with blazing eyes.

"What right have you got to think Dan did it? There were two of them in this room. Why don't you send for Mr. Mac and ask him questions?"

"Well, for one reason he's in New York, and for another, my son doesn't have to resort to such means to get what money he wants."

"Neither does Dan Lewis! He was a street kid; he was had up in court three times before he was fourteen; he was a month at the reformatory; and he's knocked elbows with more crooks than you ever heard of; but you know as well as me that there ain't anybody living more honest than Dan!"

"All he's got to do is to prove it," said Mr. Clarke, grimly.

Nance looked at the relentless face of the man before her and thought of the money at his command to prove whatever he wanted to prove.

"See here, Mr. Clarke!" she said desperately, "you said a while ago that all the facts were against Dan. Will you tell me one thing?"

"What is it?"

"Did you give Mr. Mac the money to pay that note last Saturday?"

"What note?"

"The one the Meyers fellow was after him about?"

"Mac asked for no money, and I gave him none. In fact he told me that aside from his debts at the club and at the garage, he owed no bills. So you see your friend Meyers misinformed you."

Here was Nance's chance to escape; she had spoken in Dan's defense; she had told of the Meyers incident. To take one more step would be to convict Mac and compromise herself. For one miserable moment conflicting desires beat in her brain; then she heard herself saying quite calmly:

"No, sir, it wasn't Meyers that told me; it was Mr. Mac himself."

Mr. Clarke wheeled on her sharply.

"How did my son happen to be discussing his private affairs with you?"

"Mr. Mac and me are friends," she said. "He's been awful nice to me; he's given me more good times than I ever had in my whole life before. But I didn't know the money wasn't his or I wouldn't have gone with him."

"And I suppose you thought it was all right for a young man in Mac's position to be paying attention to a young woman in yours?"

Mr. Clarke studied her face intently, but her fearless eyes did not falter under his scrutiny.

"Are you trying to implicate Mac in this matter to spare Lewis, is that it?"

"No, sir. I don't say it was Mr. Mac. I only say it wasn't Dan. There are some people you just know are straight, and Dan's one of them."

Mr. Clarke got up and took a turn about the room, his hands locked behind him. Her last shot had evidently taken effect.

"Tell me exactly what Mac told you about this Meyers note," he demanded.

Nance recounted the facts in the case, ending with the promise Mac had made her to tell his father everything and begin anew.

"I wish I had known this Saturday!" Mr. Clarke said, sinking heavily into his chair. "I came down on the boy pretty severely on another score and gave him little chance to say anything. Did he happen to mention the exact amount of his indebtedness to Meyers?"

"He said it was five hundred and sixty dollars."

A sigh that was very like a groan escaped from Mr. Clarke; then he pulled himself together with an effort.

"You understand, Miss Molloy," he said, "that it is quite a different thing for my son to have done this, and for Lewis to have done it. Mac knows that what is mine will be his eventually. If he signed that check, he was signing his own name as well as mine. Of course, he ought to have spoken to me about it. I am not excusing him. He has been indiscreet in this as well as in other ways. I shall probably get a letter from him in a few days explaining the whole business. In the meanwhile the matter must go no further. I insist upon absolute silence. You understand?"

She nodded.

"And one thing more," Mr. Clarke added. "I forbid any further communication between you and Mac. He is not coming home at Christmas, and we are thinking of sending him abroad in June. I propose to keep him away from here for the next two or three years."

Nance fingered the blotter on the table absently. It was all very well for them to plan what they were going to do with Mac, but she knew in her heart that a line from her would set at naught all their calculations. Then her mind flew back to Dan.

"If he comes back—Dan, I mean,—are you going to take him on again?"

Mr. Clarke saw his chance and seized it.

"On one condition," he said. "Will you give me your word of honor not to communicate with Mac in any way?"

They were both standing now, facing each other, and Nance saw no compromise in the stern eyes of her employer.

"I'll promise if I've got to," she said.

"Very well," said Mr. Clarke. "That's settled."



CHAPTER XXVII

FATE TAKES A HAND

Some sinister fascination seems to hover about a bridge at night, especially for unhappy souls who have grappled with fate and think themselves worsted. Perhaps they find a melancholy pleasure in the company of ghosts who have escaped from similar defeats; perhaps they seek to read the riddle of the universe, as they stand, elbows on rail, studying the turbulent waters below.

On the third night after Dan's arrival in Cincinnati, the bridge claimed him. He had deposited his few belongings in a cheap lodging-house on the Kentucky side of the river, and then aimlessly paced the streets, too miserable to eat or sleep, too desperate even to look for work. His one desire was to get away from his tormenting thoughts, to try to forget what had happened to him.

A cold drizzle of rain had brought dusk on an hour before its time. Twilight was closing in on a sodden day. From the big Ohio city to the smaller Kentucky towns, poured a stream of tired humanity. Belated shoppers, business men, workers of all kinds hurried through the murky soot-laden air, each hastening to some invisible goal.

To Dan, watching with somber eyes from his niche above the wharf, it seemed that they were all going home to little lamp-lit cottages where women and children awaited them. A light in the window and somebody waiting! The old dream of his boyhood that only a few days ago had seemed about to come true!

Instead, he had been caught up in a hurricane and swept out to sea. His anchors had been his love, his work, and his religion, and none of them held. The factory, to which he had given the best of his brain and his body, for which he had dreamed and aspired and planned, was a nightmare to him. Mrs. Purdy and the church activities, which had loomed so large in his life, were but fleeting, unsubstantial shadows.

Only one thing in the wide universe mattered now to him, and that was Nance. Over and over he rehearsed his final scene with her, searching for some word of denial or contrition or promise for the future. She had never lied to him, and he knew she never would. But she had stood before him in angry defiance, refusing to defend herself, declining his help, and letting him go out of her life without so much as lifting a finger to stop him.

His heavy eyes, which had been following the shore lights, came back to the bridge, attracted by the movement of a woman leaning over one of the embrasures near him. He had been vaguely aware for the past five minutes of a disturbing sound that came to him from time to time; but it was only now that he noticed the woman was crying. She was standing with her back to him, and he could see her lift her veil every now and then and wipe her eyes.

With a movement of impatience, he moved further on. He had enough troubles of his own to-night without witnessing those of others. He had determined to stop fleeing from his thoughts and to turn and face them. A rich young fellow, like Mac Clarke, didn't go with a girl like Nance for nothing. Why, this thing must have been going on for months, perhaps long before the night he had found Nance at the signal tower. They had been meeting in secret, going out alone together; she had let him make love to her, kiss her.

The blood surged into his head, and doubts blacker than the waters below assailed him, but even as he stood there with his head in his hands and his cap pulled over his eyes, all sorts of shadowy memories came to plead for her. Memories of a little, tow-headed, independent girl coming and going in Calvary Alley, now lugging coal up two flights of stairs, now rushing noisily down again with a Snawdor baby slung over her shoulder, now to snatch her part in the play. Nance, who laughed the loudest, cried the hardest, ran the fastest, whose hand was as quick to help a friend as to strike a foe! He saw her sitting beside him on the mattress, sharing his disgrace on the day of the eviction, saw her standing before the bar of justice passionately pleading his cause. Then later and tenderer memories came to reinforce the earlier ones—memories of her gaily dismissing all other offers at the factory to trudge home night after night with him; of her sitting beside him in Post-Office Square, subdued and tender-eyed, watching the electric lights bloom through the dusk; of her nursing Uncle Jed, forgetting herself and her disappointment in ministering to him and helping him face the future.

A wave of remorse swept over him! What right had he to make her stay on and on in Cemetery Street when he knew how she hated it? Why had he forced her to go back to the factory? She had tried to make him understand, but he had been deaf to her need. He had expected her to buckle down to work just as he did. He had forgotten that she was young and pretty and wanted a good time like other girls. Of course it was wrong for her to go with Mac, but she was good, he knew she was good.

The words reverberated in his brain like a hollow echo, frightening away all the pleading memories. Those were the very words he had used about his mother on that other black night when he had refused to believe the truth. All the bitterness of his childhood's tragedy came now to poison his present mood. If Nance was innocent, why had she kept all this from him, why had she refused in the end to let him defend her good name?

He thought of his own struggle to be good; of his ceaseless efforts to be decent in every thought as well as deed for Nance's sake. Decent! His lip curled at the irony of it! That wasn't what girls wanted? Decency made fellows stupid and dull; it kept them too closely at work; it made them take life too seriously. Girls wanted men like Mac Clarke—men who snapped their fingers at religion and refused responsibilities, and laughed in the face of duty. Laughter! That was what Nance loved above everything! All right, let her have it! What did it matter? He would laugh too.

With a reckless resolve, he turned up his coat collar, rammed his hands in his pockets, and started toward the Kentucky shore. The drizzle by this time had turned into a sharp rain, and he realized that he was cold and wet. He remembered a swinging door two squares away.

As he left the bridge, he saw the woman in the blue veil hurry past him, and with a furtive look about her, turn and go down the steep levee toward the water. There was something so nervous and erratic in her movements, that he stopped to watch her.

For a few moments she wandered aimlessly along the bank, apparently indifferent to the pelting rain; then she succeeded, after some difficulty, in climbing out on one of the coal barges that fringed the river bank.



Dan glanced down the long length of the bridge, empty now save for a few pedestrians and a lumbering truck in the distance. In mid-stream the paddle of a river steamer was churning the water into foam, and up-stream, near the dock, negro roustabouts could be heard singing. But under the bridge all was silent, and the levee was deserted in both directions. He strained his eyes to distinguish that vague figure on the barge from the surrounding shadows. He saw her crawling across the shifting coal; then he waited to see no more.

Plunging down the bank at full speed, he scrambled out on the barge and seized her by the arms. The struggle was brief, but fierce. With a cry of despair, she sank face downward on the coal and burst into hysterical weeping.

"Don't call a policeman!" she implored wildly. "Don't let 'em take me to a hospital!"

"I won't. Don't try to talk 'til you get hold of yourself," said Dan.

"But I'm chokin'! I can't breathe! Get the veil off!"

As Dan knelt above her, fumbling with the long veil, he noticed for the first time that she was young, and that her bare neck between the collar and the ripple of her black hair was very white and smooth. He bent down and looked at her with a flash of recognition.

"Birdie!" he cried incredulously, "Birdie Smelts!"

Her heavy white lids fluttered wildly, and she started up in terror.

"Don't be scared!" he urged. "It's Dan Lewis from back home. How did you ever come to be in this state?"

With a moan of despair she covered her face with her hands.

"I was up there on the bridge," Dan went on, almost apologetically. "I saw you there, but I didn't know it was you. Then when you started down to the water, I sorter thought—"

"You oughtn't 'a' stopped me," she wailed. "I been walkin' the streets tryin' to get up my courage all day. I'm sick, I tell you. I want to die."

"But it ain't right to die this way. Don't you know it's wicked?"

"Good and bad's all the same to me. I'm done for. There ain't a soul in this rotten old town that cares whether I live or die!"

Dan flushed painfully. He was much more equal to saving a body than a soul, but he did not flinch from his duty.

"God cares," he said. "Like as not He sent me out on the bridge a-purpose to-night to help you. You let me put you on the train, Birdie, and ship you home to your mother."

"Never! I ain't goin' home, and I ain't goin' to a hospital. Promise me you won't let 'em take me, Dan!"

"All right, all right," he said, with an anxious eye on her shivering form and her blue lips. "Only we got to get under cover somewhere. Do you feel up to walking yet?"

"Where'd I walk to?" she demanded bitterly. "I tell you I've got no money and no place to go. I been on the street since yesterday noon."

"You can't stay out here all night!" said Dan at his wit's end. "I'll have to get you a room somewhere."

"Go ahead and get it. I'll wait here."

But Dan mistrusted the look of cunning that leaped into her eyes and the way she glanced from time to time at the oily, black water that curled around the corner of the barge.

"I got a room a couple of squares over," he said slowly. "You might come over there 'til you get dried out and rested up a bit."

"I don't want to go anywhere. I'm too sick. I don't want to have to see people."

"You won't have to. It's a rooming house. The old woman that looks after things has gone by now."

It took considerable persuasion to get her on her feet and up the bank. Again and again she refused to go on, declaring that she didn't want to live. But Dan's patience was limitless. Added to his compassion for her, was the half-superstitious belief that he had been appointed by Providence to save her.

"It's just around the corner now," he encouraged her. "Can you make it?"

She stumbled on blindly, without answering, clinging to his arm and. breathing heavily.

"Here we are!" said Dan, turning into a dark entrance, "front room on the left. Steady there!"

But even as he opened the door, Birdie swayed forward and would have fallen to the floor, had he not caught her and laid her on the bed.

Hastily lighting the lamp on the deal table by the window, he went back to the bed and loosened the neck of her dripping coat and then looked down at her helplessly. Her face, startlingly white in its frame of black hair, showed dark circles under the eyes, and her full lips had lost not only their color, but the innocent curves of childhood as well.

Presently she opened her eyes wearily and looked about her.

"I'm cold," she said with a shiver, "and hungry. God! I didn't know anybody could be so hungry!"

"I'll make a fire in the stove," cried Dan; "then I'll go out and get you something hot to drink. You'll feel better soon."

"Don't be long, Dan," she whispered faintly. "I'm scared to stay by myself."

Ten minutes later Dan hurried out of the eating-house at the corner, balancing a bowl of steaming soup in one hand and a plate of food in the other. He was soaked to the skin, and the rain trickled from his hair into his eyes. As he crossed the street a gust of wind caught his cap and hurled it away into the wet night. But he gave no thought to himself or to the weather, for the miracle had happened. That dancing gleam in the gutter came from a lighted lamp in a window behind which some one was waiting for him.

He found Birdie shaking with a violent chill, and it was only after he had got off her wet coat and wrapped her in a blanket, and persuaded her to drink the soup that she began to revive.

"What time of night is it?" she asked weakly.

"After eleven. You're going to stay where you are, and I'm going out and find me a room somewhere. I'll come back in the morning."

All of Birdie's alarms returned.

"I ain't going to stay here by myself, Dan. I'll go crazy, I tell you! I don't want to live and I am afraid to die. What sort of a God is He to let a person suffer like this?"

And poor old Dan, at death-grips with his own life problem, wrestled in vain with hers; arguing, reassuring, affirming, trying with an almost fanatic zeal to conquer his own doubts in conquering hers.

Then Birdie, bent on keeping him with her, talked of herself, pouring out an incoherent story of misfortune: how she had fainted on the stage one night and incurred the ill-will of the director; how the company went on and left her without friends and without money; how matters had gone from bad to worse until she couldn't stand it any longer. She painted a picture of wronged innocence that would have wrung a sterner heart than Dan's.

"I know," he said sympathetically. "I've seen what girls are up against at Clarke's."

Birdie's feverish eyes fastened upon him.

"Have you just come from Clarke's?"

"Yes."

"Is Mac there?"

Dan's face hardened.

"I don't know anything about him."

"No; and you don't want to! If there's one person in this world I hate, it's Mac Clarke."

"Same here," said Dan, drawn to her by the attraction of a common antipathy.

"Thinks he can do what he pleases," went on Birdie, bitterly, "with his good looks and easy ways. He'll have a lot to answer for!"

Dan sat with his fists locked, staring at the floor. A dozen questions burned on his lips, but he could not bring himself to ask them.

A fierce gust of wind rattled the window, and Birdie cried out in terror.

"You stop being afraid and go to sleep," urged Dan, but she shook her head.

"I don't dare to! You'd go away, and I'd wake up and go crazy with fear. I always was like that even when I was a kid, back home. I used to pretty near die of nights when pa would come in drunk and get to breaking up things. There was a man like that down where I been staying. He'd fall against my door 'most every night. Sometimes I'd meet him out in the street, and he'd follow me for squares."

Dan drew the blanket about her shoulders.

"Go to sleep," he said. "I won't leave you."

"Yes; but to-morrow night, and next night! Oh, God! I'm smothering. Lift me up!"

He sat on the side of the bed and lifted her until she rested against his shoulder. A deathly pallor had spread over her features, and she clung to him weakly.

Through the long hours of the stormy night he sat there, soothing and comforting her, as he would have soothed a terror-stricken child. By and by her clinging hands grew passive in his, her rigid, jerking limbs relaxed, and she fell into a feverish sleep broken by fitful sobs and smothered outcries. As Dan sat there, with her helpless weight against him, and gently stroked the wet black hair from her brow, something fierce and protective stirred in him, the quick instinct of the chivalrous strong to defend the weak. Here was somebody more wretched, more desolate, more utterly lonely than himself—a soft, fearful, feminine somebody, ill-fitted to fight the world with those frail, white hands.

Hitherto he had blindly worshiped at one shrine, and now the image was shattered, the shrine was empty—so appallingly empty that he was ready to fill it at any cost. For the first time in three days he ceased to think of Nance Molloy or of Mac Clarke, whose burden he was all unconsciously bearing. He ceased, also, to think of the soul he had been trying so earnestly to save. He thought instead of the tender weight against his shoulder, of the heavy lashes that lay on the tear-stained cheeks so close to his, of the soft, white brow under his rough, brown fingers. Something older than love or religion was making its claim on Dan.



CHAPTER XXVIII

THE PRICE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

It was November of the following year that the bird of ill-omen, which had been flapping its wings over Calvary Alley for so long, decided definitely to alight. A catastrophe occurred that threatened to remove the entire population of the alley to another and, we trust, a fairer world.

Mrs. Snawdor insists to this day that it was the sanitary inspector who started the trouble. On one of his infrequent rounds he had encountered a strange odor in Number One, a suspicious, musty odor that refused to come under the classification of krout, kerosene, or herring. The tenants, in a united body, indignantly defended the smell.

"It ain't nothin' at all but Mis' Smelts' garbage," Mrs. Snawdor declared vehemently. "She often chucks it in a hole in the kitchen floor to save steps. Anybody'd think the way you was carryin' on, it was a murdered corpse!"

But the inspector persisted in his investigations, forcing a way into the belligerent Snawdor camp, where he found Fidy Yager with a well-developed case of smallpox. She had been down with what was thought to be chicken-pox for a week, but the other children had been sworn to secrecy under the threat that the doctor would scrape the skin off their arms with a knife if they as much as mentioned Fidy's name.

It was a culmination of a battle that had raged between Mrs. Snawdor and the health authorities for ten years, over the question of vaccination. The epidemic that followed was the visible proof of Mrs. Snawdor's victory.

Calvary Alley, having offered a standing invitation to germs in general, was loathe to regard the present one as an enemy. It resisted the inspector, who insisted on vaccinating everybody all over again; it was indignant at the headlines in the morning papers; it was outraged when Number One was put in quarantine.

Even when Fidy Yager, who "wasn't all there," and who, according to her mother, had "a fit a minute," was carried away to the pest-house, nobody was particularly alarmed. But when, twenty-four hours later, Mr. Snawdor and one of the Lavinski helpers came down with it, the alley began to look serious, and Mrs. Snawdor sent for Nance.

For six months now Nance had been living at a young women's boarding home, realizing a life-long ambition to get out of the alley. But on hearing the news, she flung a few clothes into an old suitcase and rushed to the rescue.

Since that never-to-be-forgotten day a year ago when word had reached her of Dan's marriage to Birdie Smelts, a hopeless apathy had possessed her. Even in the first weeks after his departure, when Mac's impassioned letters were pouring in and she was exerting all her will power to make good her promise to his father, she was aware of a dull, benumbing anxiety over Dan. She had tried to get his address from Mrs. Purdy, from Slap Jack's, where he still kept some of his things, from the men he knew best at the factory. Nobody could tell her where he had gone, or what he intended to do.

Just what she wanted to say to him she did not know. She still resented bitterly his mistrust of her, and what she regarded as his interference with her liberty, but she had no intention of letting matters rest as they were. She and Dan must fight the matter out to some satisfactory conclusion.

Then came the news of his marriage, shattering every hope and shaking the very foundation of her being. From her earliest remembrance Dan had been the most dependable factor in her existence. Whirlwind enthusiasms for other things and other people had caught her up from time to time, but she always came back to Dan, as one comes back to solid earth after a flight in an aeroplane.

In her first weeks of chagrin and mortification she had sought refuge in thoughts of Mac. She had slept with his unanswered letters under her pillow and clung to the memory of his ardent eyes, his gay laughter, the touch of his lips on her hands and cheeks. Had Mac come home that Christmas, her doom would have been sealed. The light by which she steered had suddenly gone out, and she could no longer distinguish the warning coast lights from the harbor lights of home.

But Mac had not come at Christmas, neither had he come in the summer, and Nance's emotional storm was succeeded by an equally intolerable calm. Back and forth from factory to boarding home she trudged day by day, and on Sunday she divided her wages with Mrs. Snawdor, on the condition that she should have a vote in the management of family affairs. By this plan Lobelia and the twins were kept at school, and Mr. Snawdor's feeble efforts at decent living were staunchly upheld.

When the epidemic broke out in Calvary Alley, and Mrs. Snawdor signaled for help, Nance responded to the cry with positive enthusiasm. Here was something stimulating at last. There was immediate work to be done, and she was the one to do it.

As she hurried up the steps of Number One, she found young Dr. Isaac Lavinski superintending the construction of a temporary door.

"You can't come in here!" he called to her, peremptorily. "We're in quarantine. I've got everybody out I can. But enough people have been exposed to it already to spread the disease all over the city. Three more cases to-night. Mrs. Smelts' symptoms are very suspicious. Dr. Adair is coming himself at nine o'clock to give instructions. It's going to be a tussle all right!"

Nance looked at him in amazement. He spoke with more enthusiasm than he had ever shown in the whole course of his life. His narrow, sallow face was full of keen excitement. Little old Ike, who had hidden under the bed in the old days whenever a fight was going on, was facing death with the eagerness of a valiant soldier on the eve of his first battle.

"I'm going to help you, Ike!" Nance cried instantly. "I've come to stay 'til it's over."

But Isaac barred the way.

"You can't come in, I tell you! I've cleared the decks for action. Not another person but the doctor and nurse are going to pass over this threshold!"

"Look here, Ike Lavinski," cried Nance, indignantly, "you know as well as me that there are things that ought to be done up there at the Snawdors'!"

"They'll have to go undone," said Isaac, firmly.

Nance wasted no more time in futile argument. She waited for an opportune moment when Ike's back was turned; then she slipped around the corner of the house and threaded her way down the dark passage, until she reached the fire-escape. There were no lights in the windows as she climbed past them, and the place seemed ominously still.

At the third platform she scrambled over a wash-tub and a dozen plaster casts of Pocahontas,—Mr. Snawdor's latest venture in industry,—and crawled through the window into the kitchen. It was evident at a glance that Mrs. Snawdor had at last found that long-talked-of day off and had utilized it in cleaning up. The room didn't look natural in its changed condition. Neither did Mrs. Snawdor, sitting in the gloom in an attitude of deep dejection. At sight of Nance at the window, she gave a cry of relief.

"Thank the Lord, you've come!" she said. "Can you beat this? Havin' to climb up the outside of yer own house like a fly! They've done sent Fidy to the pest-house, an' scattered the other childern all over the neighborhood, an' they got me fastened up here, like a hen in a coop!"

"How is he?" whispered Nance, glancing toward the inner room.

"Ain't a thing the matter with him, but the lumbago. Keeps on complainin' of a pain in his back. I never heard of such a hullabaloo about nothin' in all my life. They'll be havin' me down with smallpox next. How long you goin' to be here?"

Nance, taking off her hat and coat, announced that she had come to stay.

Mrs. Snawdor heaved a sigh of relief.

"Well, if you'll sorter keep a eye on him, I believe I'll step down an' set with Mis' Smelts fer a spell. I ain't been off the place fer two days."

"But wait a minute! Where's Uncle Jed? And Mr. Demry?"

"They 're done bounced too! Anybody tell you 'bout yer Uncle Jed's patent? They say he stands to make as much as a hundern dollars offen it. They say—"

"I don't care what they say!" cried Nance, distractedly. "Tell me, did the children take clean clothes with 'em? Did you see if Uncle Jed had his sweater? Have you washed the bedclothes that was on Fidy's bed?"

Mrs. Snawdor shook her head impatiently.

"I didn't, an' I ain't goin' to! That there Ike Lavinski ain't goin' to run me! He took my Fidy off to that there pest-house where I bet they operate her. He'll pay up fer this, you see if he don't!"

She began to cry, but as Nance was too much occupied to give audience to her grief, she betook herself to the first floor to assist in the care of Mrs. Smelts. Illness in the abode of another has a romantic flavor that home-grown maladies lack.

When Dr. Adair and Isaac Lavinski made their rounds at nine o'clock, they found Nance bending over a steaming tub, washing out a heavy comfort.

"What are you doing here?" demanded Isaac in stern surprise.

"Manicuring my finger-nails," she said, with an impudent grin, as she straightened her tired shoulders. Then seeing Dr. Adair, she blushed and wiped her hands on her apron.

"You don't remember me, Doctor, do you? I helped you with Uncle Jed Burks at the signal tower that time when the lightning struck him."

He looked her over, his glance traveling from her frank, friendly face to her strong bare arms.

"Why, yes, I do. You and your brother had been to some fancy-dress affair. I remember your red shoes. It isn't every girl of your age that could have done what you did that night. Have you been vaccinated?"

"Twice. Both took."

"She's got no business being here, sir," Isaac broke in hotly. "I told her to keep out."

"Doctor! Listen at me!" pleaded Nance, her hand on his coat sleeve. Honest to goodness, I got to stay. Mrs. Snawdor don't believe it's smallpox. She'll slip the children in when you ain't looking and go out herself and see the neighbors. Don't you see that somebody's got to be here that understands?"

"The girl's right, Lavinski," said Dr. Adair. "She knows the ropes here, and can be of great service to us. The nurse downstairs can't begin to do it all. Now let us have a look at the patient."

Little Mr. Snawdor was hardly worth looking at. He lay rigid, like a dried twig, with his eyes shut tight, and his mouth shut tight, and his hands clenched tighter still. It really seemed as if this time Mr. Snawdor was going to make good his old-time threat to quit.

Dr. Adair gave the necessary instructions; then he turned to go. He had been watching Nance, as she moved about the room carrying out his orders, and at the door he laid a hand on her shoulder.

"How old are you, my girl?" he asked.

"Twenty."

"We need girls like you up at the hospital. Have you ever thought of taking the training?"

"Me? I haven't got enough spondulicks to take a street-car ride."

"That part can be arranged if you really want to go into the work. Think it over."

Then he and the impatient Isaac continued on their rounds, and Nance went back to her work. But the casual remark, let fall by Dr. Adair, had set her ambition soaring. Her imagination flared to the project. Snawdor's flat extended itself into a long ward; poor little Mr. Snawdor, who was hardly half a man, became a dozen; and Miss Molloy, in a becoming uniform, moved in and out among the cots, a ministering angel of mercy.

For the first time since Dan Lewis's marriage, her old courage and zest for life returned, and when Mrs. Snawdor came in at midnight, she found her sitting beside her patient with shining eyes full of waking dreams.

"Mis' Smelts is awful bad," Mrs. Snawdor reported, looking more serious than she had heretofore. "Says she wants to see you before the nurse wakes up. Seems like she's got somethin' on her mind."

Nance hurried into her coat and went out into the dark, damp hall. Long black roaches scurried out of her way as she descended the stairs. In the hall below the single gas-jet flared in the draught, causing ghostly shadows to leap out of corners and then skulk fearfully back again. Nance was not afraid, but a sudden sick loathing filled her. Was she never going to be able to get away from it all? Was that long arm of duty going to stretch out and find her wherever she went, and drag her back to this noisome spot? Were all her dreams and ambitions to die, as they had been born, in Calvary Alley?

Mrs. Smelts had been moved into an empty room across the hall from her own crowded quarters, and as Nance pushed open the door, she lifted a warning hand and beckoned.

"Shut it," she said in a hoarse whisper. "I don't want nobody to hear what I got to tell you."

"Can't it wait, Mrs. Smelts?" asked Nance, with a pitying hand on the feverish brow across which a long white scar extended.

"No. They're goin' to take me away in the mornin'. I heard 'em say so. It's about Birdie, Nance, I want to tell you. They've had to lock her up."

"It's the fever makes you think that, Mrs. Smelts. You let me sponge you off a bit."

"No, no, not yet. She's crazy, I tell you! She went out of her head last January when the baby come. Dan's kept it to hisself all this time, but now he's had to send her to the asylum."

"Who told you?"

"Dan did. He wrote me when he sent me the last money. I got his letter here under my pillow. I want you to burn it, Nance, so no one won't know."

Nance went on mechanically stroking the pain-racked head, as she reached under the pillow for Dan's letter. The sight of the neat, painstaking writing made her heart contract.

"You tell him fer me," begged Mrs. Smelts, weakly, "to be good to her. She never had the right start. Her paw handled me rough before she come, an' she was always skeery an' nervous like. But she was so purty, oh, so purty, an' me so proud of her!"

Nance wiped away the tears that trickled down the wrinkled cheeks, and tried to quiet her, but the rising fever made her talk on and on.

"I ain't laid eyes on her since a year ago this fall. She come home sick, an' nobody knew it but me. I got out of her whut was her trouble, an' I went to see his mother, but it never done no good. Then I went to the bottle factory an' tried to get his father to listen—"

"Whose father?" asked Nance, sharply.

"The Clarke boy's. It was him that did fer her. I tell you she was a good girl 'til then. But they wouldn't believe it. They give me some money to sign the paper an' not to tell; but before God it's him that's the father of her child, and poor Dan—"

But Mrs. Smelts never finished her sentence; a violent paroxysm of pain seized her, and at dawn the messenger that called for the patient on the third floor, following the usual economy practised in Calvary Alley, made one trip serve two purposes and took her also.

By the end of the month the epidemic was routed, and the alley, cleansed and chastened as it had never been before, was restored to its own. Mr. Snawdor, Fidy Yager, Mrs. Smelts, and a dozen others, being the unfittest to survive, had paid the price of enlightenment.



CHAPTER XXIX

IN TRAINING

One sultry July night four years later Dr. Isaac Lavinski, now an arrogant member of the staff at the Adair Hospital, paused on his last round of the wards and cocked an inquiring ear above the steps that led to the basement. Something that sounded very much like suppressed laughter came up to him, and in order to confirm his suspicions, he tiptoed down to the landing and, making an undignified syphon of himself, peered down into the rear passage. In a circle on the floor, four nurses in their nightgowns softly beat time, while a fifth, arrayed in pink pajamas, with her hair flying, gave a song and dance with an abandon that ignored the fact that the big thermometer in the entry registered ninety-nine.

The giggles that had so disturbed Dr. Lavinski's peace of mind increased in volume, as the dancer executed a particularly daring passeul and, turning a double somersault, landed deftly on her bare toes.

"Go on, do it again!" "Show us how Sheeny Ike dances the tango." "Sing Barney McKane," came in an enthusiastic chorus.

But before the encore could be responded to, a familiar sound in the court without, sent the girls scampering to their respective rooms.

Dr. Isaac, reluctantly relinquishing his chance for administering prompt and dramatic chastisement, came down the stairs and out to the entry.

An ambulance had just arrived, and behind it was a big private car, and behind that Dr. Adair's own neat runabout.

Dr. Adair met Dr. Isaac at the door.

"It's an emergency case," he explained hastily. "I may have to operate to-night. Prepare number sixteen, and see if Miss Molloy is off duty."

"She is, sir," said Isaac, grimly, "and the sooner she's put on a case the better."

"Tell her to report at once. And send an orderly down to lend a hand with the stretcher."

Five minutes later an immaculate nurse, every button fastened, every fold in place, presented herself on the third floor for duty. You would have had to look twice to make certain that that slim, trim figure in its white uniform was actually Nance Molloy. To be sure her eyes sparkled with the old fire under her becoming cap, and her chin was still carried at an angle that hinted the possession of a secret gold mine, but she had changed amazingly for all that. Life had evidently been busy chiseling away her rough edges, and from a certain poise of body and a professional control of voice and gesture, it was apparent that Nance had done a little chiseling on her own account.

As she stood in the dim corridor awaiting orders, she could not help overhearing a conversation between Dr. Adair and the agitated lady who stood with her hand on the door-knob of number sixteen.

"My dear madam," the doctor was saying in a tone that betokened the limit of patience, "you really must leave the matter to my judgment, if we operate—"

"But you won't unless it's the last resort?" pleaded the lady. "You know how frightfully sensitive to pain he is. But if you find out that you must, then I want you to promise me not to let him suffer afterward. You must keep him under the influence of opiates, and you will wait until his father can get here, won't you?"

"But that's the trouble. You've waited too long already. Appendicitis is not a thing to take liberties with."

"You don't mean it's too late? You don't think—"

"We don't think anything at present. We hope everything." Then spying Nance, he turned toward her with relief. "This is the nurse who will take charge of the case."

The perturbed lady uncovered one eye.

"You are sure she is one of your very best?"

"One of our best," said the doctor, as he and Nance exchanged a quizzical smile.

"Let her go in to him now. I can't bear for him to be alone a second. As I was telling you—"

Nance passed into the darkened room and closed the door softly. The patient was evidently asleep; so she tiptoed over to the window and slipped into a chair. On each side of the open space without stretched the vine-clad wings of the hospital, gray now under the starlight. Nance's eyes traveled reminiscently from floor to floor, from window to window. How many memories the old building held for her! Memories of heartaches and happiness, of bad times and good times, of bitter defeats and dearly won triumphs.

It had been no easy task for a girl of her limited education and undisciplined nature to take the training course. But she had gallantly stood to her guns and out of seeming defeat, won a victory. For the first time in her diversified career she had worked in a congenial environment toward a fixed goal, and in a few weeks now she would be launching her own little boat on the professional main.

Her eyes grew tender as she thought of leaving these protecting gray walls that had sheltered her for four long years; yet the adventure of the future was already calling. Where would her first case lead her?

A cough from the bed brought her sharply back to the present. She went forward and stooped to adjust a pillow, and the patient opened his eyes, stared at her in bewilderment, then pulled himself up on his elbow.

"Nance!" he cried incredulously. "Nance Molloy!"

She started back in dismay.

"Why, it's Mr. Mac! I didn't know! I thought I'd seen the lady before—no, please! Stop, they're coming! Please, Mr. Mac!"

For the patient, heretofore too absorbed in his own affliction to note anything, was covering her imprisoned hands with kisses and calling on Heaven to witness that he was willing to undergo any number of operations if she would nurse him through them.

Nance escaped from the room as Mrs. Clarke entered. With burning cheeks she rushed to Dr. Adair's office.

"You'll have to get somebody else on that case, Doctor," she declared impulsively. "I used to work for Mr. Clarke up at the bottle factory, and—and there are reasons why I don't want to take it."

Dr. Adair looked at her over his glasses and frowned.

"It is a nurse's duty," he said sternly, "to take the cases as they come, irrespective of likes or dislikes. Mr. Clarke is an old friend of mine, a man I admire and respect."

"Yes, sir, I know, but if you'll just excuse me this once—"

"Is Miss Rand off duty?"

"No, sir. She's in number seven."

"Miss Foster?"

"No, sir."

"Then I shall have to insist upon your taking the case. I must have somebody I can depend upon to look after young Clarke for the next twenty-four hours. It's not only the complication with his appendix; it's his lungs."

"You mean he's tubercular?"

"Yes."

Nance's eyes widened.

"Does he know it?"

"No. I shall wait and tell his father. I wouldn't undertake to break the news to that mother of his for a house and lot! You take the case to-night, and I'll operate in the morning—"

"No, no, please, Doctor! Mr. Clarke wouldn't want me."

"Mr. Clarke will be satisfied with whatever arrangement I see fit to make. Besides another nurse will be in charge by the time he arrives."

"But, Doctor—"

A stern glance silenced her, and she went out, closing the door as hard as she dared behind her. During her four years at the hospital the memory of Mac Clarke had grown fainter and fainter like the perfume of a fading flower. But the memory of Dan was like a thorn in her flesh, buried deep, but never forgotten.

To herself, her fellow-nurses, the young internes who invariably fell in love with her, she declared gaily that she was "through with men forever." The subject that excited her fiercest scorn was matrimony, and she ridiculed sentiment with the superior attitude of one who has weighed it in the balance and found it wanting.

Nevertheless something vaguely disturbing woke in her that night when she watched with Mrs. Clarke at Mac's bedside. Despite the havoc five years had wrought in him, there was the old appealing charm in his voice and manner, the old audacity in his whispered words when she bent over him, the old eager want in his eyes as they followed her about the room.

Toward morning he dropped into a restless sleep, and Mrs. Clarke, who had been watching his every breath, tiptoed over to the table and sat down by Nance.

"My son tells me you are the Miss Molloy who used to be in the office," she whispered. "He is so happy to find some one here he knows. He loathes trained nurses as a rule. They make him nervous. But he has been wonderfully good about letting you do things for him. It's a tremendous relief to me."

Nance made a mistake on the chart that was going to call for an explanation later.

"He's been losing ground ever since last winter," the doting mother went on. "He was really quite well at Divonne-les-Bains, but he lost all he gained when we reached Paris. You see he doesn't know how to take care of himself; that's the trouble."

Mac groaned and she hurried to him.

"He wants a cigarette, Miss Molloy. I don't believe it would hurt him," she said.

"His throat's already irritated," said Nance, in her most professional tone. "I am sure Dr. Adair wouldn't want him to smoke."

"But we can't refuse him anything to-night," said Mrs. Clarke, with an apologetic smile as she reached for the matches.

Nance looking at her straight, delicate profile thrown into sudden relief by the flare of the match, had the same disturbing sense of familiarity that she had experienced long ago in the cathedral.

But during the next twenty-four hours there was no time to analyze subtle impressions or to indulge in sentimental reminiscence. From the moment Mac's unconscious form was borne down from the operating room and handed over to her care, he ceased to be a man and became a critically ill patient.

"We haven't much to work on," said Dr. Adair, shaking his head. "He has no resisting power. He has burned himself out."

But Mac's powers of resistance were stronger than he thought, and by the time Mr. Clarke arrived the crisis was passed. Slowly and painfully he struggled back to consciousness, and his first demand was for Nance.

"It's the nurse he had when he first came," Mrs. Clarke explained to her husband. "You must make Dr. Adair give her back to us. She's the only nurse I've ever seen who could get Mac to do things. By the way, she used to be in your office, a rather pretty, graceful girl, named Molloy."

"I remember her," said Mr. Clarke, grimly. "You better leave things as they are. Miss Hanna seems to know her business."

"But Mac hates Miss Hanna! He says her hands make him think of bedsprings. Miss Molloy makes him laugh and helps him to forget the pain. He's taken a tremendous fancy to her."

"Yes, he had quite a fancy for her once before."

"Now, Macpherson, how can you?" cried Mrs. Clarke on the verge of tears. "Just because the boy made one slip when he was little more than a child, you suspect his every motive. I don't see how you can be so cruel! If you had seen his agony, if you had been through what I have—"

Thus it happened that instead of keeping Nance out of Mac's sight, Mrs. Clarke left no stone unturned to get her back, and Mr. Clarke was even persuaded to take it up personally with Dr. Adair.

Nance might have held out to the end, had her sympathies not been profoundly stirred by the crushing effect the news of Mac's serious tubercular condition had upon his parents. On the day they were told Mr. Clarke paced the corridor for hours with slow steps and bent head, refusing to see people or to answer the numerous inquiries over the telephone. As for Mrs. Clarke, all the fragile prettiness and girlish grace she had carried over into maturity, seemed to fall away from her within the hour, leaving her figure stooped and her face settled into lines of permanent anxiety.

The mother's chief concern now was to break the news of his condition to Mac, who was already impatiently straining at the leash, eager to get back to his old joyous pursuits and increasingly intolerant of restrictions.

"He refuses to listen to me or to his father," she confided to Nance, who had coaxed her down to the yard for a breath of fresh air. "I'm afraid we've lost our influence over him. And yet I can't bear for Dr. Adair to tell him. He's so stern and says such dreadful things. Do you know he actually was heartless enough to tell Mac that he had brought a great deal of this trouble on himself!"

Nance slipped her hand through Mrs. Clarke's arm, and patted it reassuringly. She had come to have a sort of pitying regard for this terror-stricken mother during these days of anxious waiting.

"I wonder if you would be willing to tell him?" Mrs. Clarke asked, looking at her appealingly. "Maybe you could make him understand without frightening him."

"I'll try," said Nance, with ready sympathy.

The opportunity came one day in the following week when the regular day nurse was off duty. She found Mac alone, propped up in bed, and tremendously glad to see her. To a less experienced person the brilliancy of his eyes and the color in his cheeks would have meant returning health, but to Nance they were danger signals that nerved her to her task.

"I hear you are going home next week," she said, resting her crossed arms on the foot of his bed. "Going to be good and take care of yourself?"

"Not on your life!" cried Mac, gaily, searching under his pillow for his cigarette case. "The lid's been on for a month, and it's coming off with a bang. I intend to shoot the first person that mentions health to me."

"Fire away then," said Nance. "I'm it. I've come to hand you out a nice little bunch of advice."

"You needn't. I've got twice as much now as I intend to use. Come on around here and be sociable. I want to make love to you."

Nance declined the invitation.

"Has Dr. Adair put you wise on what he's letting you in for?"

"Rather! Raw eggs, rest, and rust. Mother put him up to it. It's perfect rot. I'll be feeling fit as a fiddle inside of two weeks. All I need is to get out of this hole. They couldn't have kept me here this long if it hadn't been for you."

"And I reckon you're counting on going back and speeding up just as you did before?"

"Sure, why not?"

"Because you can't. The sooner you soak that in, the better."

He blew a succession of smoke rings in her direction and laughed.

"So they've taken you into the conspiracy, have they? Going to frighten me into the straight and narrow, eh? Suppose I tell them that I'm lovesick? That there's only one cure for me in the world, and that's you?"

The ready retort with which she had learned to parry these personalities was not forthcoming. She felt as she had that day five years ago in his father's office, when she told him what she thought of him. He smiled up at her with the same irresponsible light in his brown eyes, the same eager desire to sidestep the disagreeable, the old refusal to accept life seriously. He was such a boy despite his twenty-six years. Such a spoiled, selfish lovable boy!

With a sudden rush of pity, she went to him and took his hand:

"See here, Mr. Mac," she said very gravely, "I got to tell you something. Dr. Adair wanted to tell you from the first, but your mother headed him off."

He shot a swift glance at her.

"What do you mean, Nance?"

Then Nance sat on the side of his bed and explained to him, as gently and as firmly as she could, the very serious nature of his illness, emphasizing the fact that his one chance for recovery lay in complete surrender to a long and rigorous regime of treatment.

From scoffing incredulity, he passed to anxious skepticism and then to agonized conviction. It was the first time he had ever faced any disagreeable fact in life from which there was no appeal, and he cried out in passionate protest. If he was a "lunger" he wanted to die as soon as possible. He hated those wheezy chaps that went coughing through life, avoiding draughts, and trying to keep their feet dry. If he was going to die, he wanted to do it with a rush. He'd be hanged if he'd cut out smoking, drinking, and running with the boys, just to lie on his back for a year and perhaps die at the end of it!

Nance faced the bitter crisis with him, whipping up his courage, strengthening his weak will, nerving him for combat. When she left him an hour later, with his face buried in the pillow and his hands locked above his head, he had promised to submit to the doctor's advice on the one condition that she would go home with him and start him on that fight for life that was to tax all his strength and patience and self-control.



CHAPTER XXX

HER FIRST CASE

October hovered over Kentucky that year in a golden halo of enchantment. The beech-trees ran the gamut of glory, and every shrub and weed had its hour of transient splendor. A soft haze from burning brush lent the world a sense of mystery and immensity. Day after day on the south porch at Hillcrest Mac Clarke lay propped with cushions on a wicker couch, while Nance Molloy sat beside him, and all about them was a stir of whispering, dancing, falling leaves. The hillside was carpeted with them, the brook below the pergola was strewn with bits of color, while overhead the warm sunshine filtered through canopies of russet and crimson and green.

"I tell you the boy is infatuated with that girl," Mr. Clarke warned his wife from time to time.

"What nonsense!" Mrs. Clarke answered. "He is just amusing himself a bit. He will forget her as soon as he gets out and about."

"But the girl?"

"Oh, she's too sensible to have any hopes of that kind. She really is an exceptionally nice girl. Rather too frank in her speech, and frequently ungrammatical and slangy, but I don't know what we should do without her."

But even Mrs. Clarke's complacence was a bit shaken as the weeks slipped away, and Mac's obsession became the gossip of the household. To be sure, so long as Nance continued to regard the whole matter as a joke and refused to take Mac seriously, no harm would be done. But that very indifference that assured his adoring mother, at the same time piqued her pride. That an ordinary trained nurse, born and brought up, Heaven knew where, should be insensible to Mac's even transient attention almost amounted to an impertinence. Quite unconsciously she began to break down Nance's defenses.

"You must be very good to my boy, dear," she said one day in her gentle, coaxing way. "I know he's a bit capricious and exacting at times. But we can't afford to cross him now when he is just beginning to improve. He was terribly upset last night when you teased him about leaving."

"But I ought to go, Mrs. Clarke. He'd get along just as well now with another nurse. Besides I only promised—"

"Not another word!" implored Mrs. Clarke in instant alarm. "I wouldn't answer for the consequences if you left us now. Mac goes all to pieces when it is suggested. He has always been so used to having his own way, you know."

Yes, Nance knew. Between her unceasing efforts to get him well, and her grim determination to keep the situation well in hand, she had unlimited opportunity of finding out. The physicians agreed that his chances for recovery were one to three. It was only by the most persistent observance of certain regulations pertaining to rest, diet, and fresh air, that they held out any hope of arresting the malady that had already made such alarming headway. Nance realized from the first that it was to be a fight against heavy odds, and she gallantly rose to the emergency. Aside from the keen personal interest she took in Mac, and the sympathy she felt for his stricken parents, she had an immense pride in her first private case, on which she was determined to win her spurs.

For three months now she had controlled the situation. With undaunted perseverance she had made Mac submit to authority and succeeded in successfully combatting his mother's inclination to yield to his every whim. The gratifying result was that Mac was gradually putting on flesh and, with the exception of a continued low fever, was showing decided improvement. Already talk of a western flight was in the air.

The whole matter hinged at present on Mac's refusal to go unless Nance could be induced to accompany them. The question had been argued from every conceivable angle, and gradually a conspiracy had been formed between Mac and his mother to overcome her apparently absurd resistance.

"It isn't as if she had any good reason," Mrs. Clarke complained to her husband, with tears in her eyes. "She has no immediate family, and she might just as well be on duty in California as in Kentucky. I don't see how she can refuse to go when she sees how weak Mac is, and how he depends on her."

"The girl's got more sense than all the rest of you put together!" said Mr. Clarke. "She sees the way things are going."

"Well, what if Mac is in love with her?" asked Mrs. Clarke, for the first time frankly facing the situation. "Of course it's just his sick fancy, but he is in no condition to be argued with. The one absolutely necessary thing is to get her to go with us. Suppose you ask her. Perhaps that's what she is waiting for."

"And you are willing to take the consequences?"

"I am willing for anything on earth that will help me keep my boy," sobbed Mrs. Clarke, resorting to a woman's surest weapon.

So Mr. Clarke turned his ponderous batteries upon the situation, using money as the ammunition with which he was most familiar.

The climax was reached one night toward the end of October when the first heavy hoar-frost of the season gave premonitory threat of coming winter. The family was still at dinner, and Mac was having his from a tray before the library fire. The heavy curtains had been drawn against the chill world without, and the long room was a soft harmony of dull reds and browns, lit up here and there by rose-shaded lamps.

It was a luxurious room, full of trophies of foreign travel. The long walls were hung with excellent pictures; the floors were covered with rare rugs; the furniture was selected with perfect taste. Every detail had been elaborately and skilfully worked out by an eminent decorator. Only one insignificant item had been omitted. In the length and breadth of the library, not a book was to be seen.

Mac, letting his soup cool while he read the letter Nance had just brought him, gave an exclamation of surprise.

"By George! Monte Pearce is going to get married!"

Nance laughed.

"I've got a tintype of Mr. Monte settling down. Who's the girl?"

"A cousin of his in Honolulu. Her father is a sugar king; no end of cash. Think of old Monte landing a big fish like that!"

"That's what you'll be doing when you get out to your ranch."

"I intend to take my girl along."

"You'll have to get her first."

Mac turned on her with an invalid's fretfulness. "See here, Nance," he cried, "cut that out, will you? Either you go, or I stay, do you see? I know I'm a fool about you, but I can't help it. Nance, why don't you love me?"

Nance looked down at him helplessly. She had been refusing him on an average of twice a day for the past week, and her powers of resistance were weakening. The hardest granite yields in the end to the persistent dropping of water. However much the clear-headed, independent side of her might refuse him, to another side of her he was strangely appealing. Often when she was near him, the swift remembrance of other days filled her with sudden desire to yield, if only for a moment, to his insatiable demands. Despite her most heroic resolution, she sometimes relaxed her vigilance as she did to-night, and allowed her hand to rest in his.

Mac made the most of the moment.

"I don't ask you to promise me anything, Nance. I just ask you to come with me!" he pleaded, with eloquent eyes, "we can get a couple of ponies and scour the trails all over those old mountains. At Coronada there's bully sea bathing. And the motoring—why you can go for a hundred miles straight along the coast!"

Nance's eyes kindled, but she shook her head. "You can do all that without me. All I do is to jack you up and make you take care of yourself. I should think you 'd hate me, Mr. Mac."

"Well, I don't. Sometimes I wish I did. I love you even when you come down on me hardest. A chap gets sick of being mollycoddled. When you fire up and put your saucy little chin in the air, and tell me I sha'n't have a cocktail, and call me a fool for stealing a smoke, it bucks me up more than anything. By George, I believe I'd amount to something if you'd take me permanently in hand."

Nance laughed, and he pulled her down on the arm of his chair.

"Say you'll marry me, Nance," he implored. "You'll learn to care for me all right. You want to get out and see the world. I'll take you. We'll go out to Honolulu and see Monte. Mother will talk the governor over; she's promised. They'll give me anything I want, and I want you. Oh, Nance darling, don't leave me to fight through this beastly business alone!"

There was a haunted look of fear in his eyes as he clung to her that appealed to her more than his former demands had ever done. Instinctively her strong, tender hands closed over his thin, weak ones.

"Nobody expects you to fight it through alone," she reassured him, "but you come on down off this high horse! We'll be having another bad night the first thing you know."

"They'll all be bad if you don't come with me, Nance. I won't ask you to say yes to-night, but for God's sake don't say no!"

Nance observed the brilliancy of his eyes and the flush on his thin cheeks, and knew that his fever was rising.

"All right," she promised lightly. "I won't say no to-night, if you'll stop worrying. I'm going to fix you nice and comfy on the couch and not let you say another word."

But when she had got him down on the couch, nothing would do but she must sit on the hassock beside him and soothe his aching head. Sometimes he stopped her stroking hand to kiss it, but for the most part he lay with eyes half-closed and elaborated his latest whim.

"We could stay awhile in Honolulu and then go on to Japan and China. I want to see India, too, and Mandalay,

... somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, And there aren't no Ten Commandments

—you remember Kipling's Mandalay?"

Nance couldn't remember what she had never known, but she did not say so. Since her advent at Hillcrest she had learned to observe and listen without comment. This was not her world, and her shrewd common-sense told her so again and again. Even the servants who moved with such easy familiarity about their talks were more at home than she. It had kept her wits busy to meet the situation. But now that she had got over her first awkwardness, she found the new order of things greatly to her liking. For the first time in her life she was moving in a world of beautiful objects, agreeable sounds, untroubled relations, and that starved side of her that from the first had cried out for order and beauty and harmony fed ravenously upon the luxury around her.

And this was what Mac was offering her,—her, Nance Molloy of Calvary Alley,—who up to four years ago had never known anything but bare floors, flickering gas-jets, noise, dirt, confusion. He wanted her to marry him; he needed her.

She ceased to listen to his rambling talk, her eyes rested dreamily on the glowing back-log. After all didn't every woman want to marry and have a home of her own, and later perhaps—Twenty-four at Christmas! Almost an old maid! And to think Mr. Mac had gone on caring for her all these years, that he still wanted her when he had all those girls in his own world to choose from. Not many men were constant like that, she thought, as an old memory stabbed her.

Then she was aware that her hand was held fast to a hot cheek, and that a pair of burning eyes were watching her.

"Nance!" Mac whispered eagerly, "you're giving in! You're going with me!"

A step in the hall made Nance scramble to her feet just before Mrs. Clarke came in from the dining-room.

"I thought we should never get through dinner!" said that lady, with an impatient sigh. "The bishop can talk of nothing else but his new hobby, and do you know he's actually persuaded your father to give one of the tenements back of the cathedral for the free clinic!"

Nance who was starting out with the tray, put it down suddenly.

"How splendid!" she cried. "Which house is it?"

"I don't know, I am sure. But they are going to put a lot of money into doing it over, and Dr. Adair has offered to take entire charge of it. For my part I think it is a great mistake. Just think what that money would mean to our poor mission out in Mukden! These shiftless people here at home have every chance to live decently. It's not our fault if they refuse to take advantage of their opportunities."

"But they don't know how, Mrs. Clarke! If Dr. Adair could teach the mothers—"

Mrs. Clarke lifted her hands in laughing protest.

"My dear girl, don't you know that mothers can't be taught? The most ignorant mother alive has more instinctive knowledge of what is good for her child than any man that ever lived! Mac, dearest, why didn't you eat your grapes?"

"Because I loathe grapes. Nance is going to work them off on an old sick man she knows."

"Some one at the hospital?" Mrs. Clarke asked idly.

"No," said Nance, "it's an old gentleman who lives down in the very place we're talking about. He's been sick for weeks. It's all right about the grapes?"

"Why, of course. Take some oranges, too, and tell the gardener to give you some flowers. The dahlias are going to waste this year. Mac, you look tired!"

He shook off her hand impatiently.

"No, I'm not. I feel like a two-year old. Nance thinks perhaps she may go with us after all."

"Of course she will!" said Mrs. Clarke, with a confident smile at the girl. "We are going to be so good to her that she will not have the heart to refuse."

Mrs. Clarke with her talent for self-deception had almost convinced herself that Nance was a fairy princess who had languished in a nether world of obscurity until Mac's magic smile had restored her to her own.

Nance evaded an answer by fleeing to the white and red breakfast-room where the butler was laying the cloth for her dinner. As a rule she enjoyed these tete-a-tetes with the butler. He was a solemn and pretentious Englishman whom she delighted in shocking by acting and talking in a manner that was all too natural to her. But to-night she submitted quite meekly to his lordly condescension.

She ate her dinner in dreamy abstraction, her thoughts on Mac and the enticing prospects he had held out. After all what was the use in fighting against all the kindness and affection? If they were willing to take the risk of her going with them, why should she hesitate? They knew she was poor and uneducated and not of their world, and they couldn't help seeing that Mac was in love with her. And still they wanted her.

California! Honolulu! Queer far-off lands full of queer people! Big ships that would carry her out of the sight and sound of Calvary Alley forever! And Mac, well and happy, making a man of himself, giving her everything in the world she wanted.

Across her soaring thoughts struck the voices from the adjoining dining-room, Mr. Clarke's sharp and incisive, the bishop's suave and unctious. Suddenly a stray sentence arrested her attention and she listened with her glass half-way to her lips.

"It is the labor question that concerns us more than the war," Mr. Clarke was saying. "I have just succeeded in signing up with a man I have been after for four years. He is a chap named Lewis, the only man in this part of the country who seems to be able to cope with the problem of union labor."

"A son of General Lewis?"

"No, no. Just a common workman who got his training at our factory. He left me five or six years ago without rhyme or reason, and went over to the Ohio Glass Works, where he has made quite a name for himself. I had a tussle to get him back, but he comes to take charge next month. He is one of those rare men you read about, but seldom find, a practical idealist."

Nance left her ice untouched, and slipped through the back entry and up to the dainty blue bedroom that had been hers now for three months. All the delicious languor of the past hour was gone, and in its place was a turmoil of hope and fear and doubt. Dan was coming back. The words beat on her brain. He cared nothing for her, and he was married, and she would never see him, but he was coming back.

She opened the drawer of her dressing table and took out a small faded photograph which she held to the silk-shaded lamp. It was a cheap likeness of an awkward-looking working-boy in his Sunday clothes, a stiff lock of unruly hair across his temple, and a pair of fine earnest eyes looking out from slightly scowling brows.

Nance looked at it long and earnestly; then she flung it back in the drawer with a sigh and, putting out the light, went down again to her patient.



CHAPTER XXXI

MR. DEMRY

The next afternoon, armed with her flowers and fruit, Nance was setting forth for Calvary Alley, when Mrs. Clarke called to her from an upper window.

"If you will wait ten minutes, I will take you down in the machine."

"But I want the walk," Nance insisted. "I need the exercise."

"Nonsense, you are on your feet nearly all the time. I won't be long."

Nance made a wry face at an unoffending sparrow and glanced regretfully at the long white road that wound invitingly in and out of the woods until it dropped sharply to the little station in the valley a mile below. She had been looking forward to that walk all morning. She wanted to get away from the hot-house atmosphere of the Clarke establishment, away from Mac's incessant appeals and his mother's increasing dependence. Aside from amusing her patient and seeing that he obeyed Dr. Adair's orders, her duties for the past few weeks had been too light to be interesting. The luxury that at first had so thrilled her was already beginning to pall. She wanted to be out in the open alone, to feel the sharp wind of reality in her face, while she thought things out.

"I am going to the cathedral," said Mrs. Clarke, emerging from the door, followed by a maid carrying coats and rugs. "But I can drop you wherever you say."

"I'll go there, too," said Nance as she took her seat in the car. "The old gentleman I'm taking the things to lives just back of there, in the very house Dr. Adair is trying to get for the clinic."

"Poor soul!" said Mrs. Clarke idly, as she viewed with approval Nance's small brown hat that so admirably set off the lights in her hair and the warm red tints of her skin.

"He's been up against it something fierce for over a year now," Nance went on. "We've helped him all he'd let us since he stopped playing at the theater."

"Playing?" Mrs. Clarke repeated the one word that had caught her wandering attention. "Is he an actor?"

"No; he is a musician. He used to play in big orchestras in New York and Boston. He plays the fiddle."

For the rest of the way into town Mrs. Clarke was strangely preoccupied. She sat very straight, with eyes slightly contracted, and looked absently out of the window. Once or twice she began a sentence without finishing it. At the cathedral steps she laid a detaining hand on Nance's arm.

"By the way, what did you say was the name of the old man you are going to see?"

"I never said. It's Demry."

"Demry—Never mind, I just missed the step. I'm quite all right. I think I will go with you to see this—this—house they are talking about."

"But it's in the alley. Mrs. Clarke; it's awfully dirty."

"Yes, yes, but I'm coming. Can we go through here?"

So impatient was she that she did not wait for Nance to lead the way, but hurried around the bishop's study and down the concrete walk to the gate that opened into the alley.

"Look out for your skirt against the garbage barrel," warned Nance. It embarrassed her profoundly to have Mrs. Clarke in these surroundings; she hated the mud that soiled her dainty boots, the odors that must offend her nostrils, the inevitable sights that awaited her in Number One. She only prayed that Mrs. Snawdor's curl-papered head might not appear on the upper landing.

"Which way?" demanded Mrs. Clarke, impatiently.

Nance led the way into the dark hall where a half-dozen ragged, dirty-faced children were trying to drag a still dirtier pup up the stairs by means of a twine string.

"In here, Mrs. Clarke," said Nance, pushing open the door at the left

The outside shutters of the big cold room were partly closed, but the light from between them fell with startling effect on the white, marble-like face of the old man who lay asleep on a cot in front of the empty fireplace. For a moment Mrs. Clarke stood looking at him; then with a smothered cry she bent over him.

"Father!" she cried sharply, "Oh, God! It's my father!"

Nance caught her breath in amazement; then her bewildered gaze fell upon a familiar object. There, in its old place on the mantel stood the miniature of a pink and white maiden in the pink and white dress, with the golden curl across her shoulder. In the delicate, beautiful profile Nance read the amazing truth.

Mr. Demry sighed heavily, opened his eyes with an effort and, looking past the bowed head beside him, held out a feeble hand for the flowers.

"Listen, Mr. Demry," said Nance, breathlessly. "Here's a lady says she knows you. Somebody you haven't seen for a long, long time. Will you look at her and try to remember?"

His eyes rested for the fraction of a minute on the agonized face lifted to his, then closed wearily.

"Can you not get the lady a chair, Nancy?" he asked feebly. "You can borrow one from the room across the hall."

"Father!" demanded Mrs. Clarke, "don't you know me? It is Elise. Your daughter, Elise Demorest!"

"Demorest," he repeated, and smiled. "How unnatural it sounds now! Demorest!"

"It's no use," said Nance. "His mind wanders most of the time. Let me take you back to the cathedral, Mrs. Clarke, until we decide what's got to be done."

"I am going to take him home," said Mrs. Clarke, wildly. "He shall have every comfort and luxury I can give him. Poor Father, don't you want to come home with Elise?"

"I live at Number One, Calvary Alley," said Mr. Demry, clinging to the one fact he had trained his mind to remember. "If you will kindly get me to the corner, the children will—"

"It's too late to do anything!" cried Mrs. Clarke, wringing her hands. "I knew something terrible would happen to him. I pleaded with them to help me find him, but they put me off. Then I got so absorbed in Mac that he drove everything else out of my mind. How long has he been in this awful place? How long has he been ill? Who takes care of him?"

Nance, with her arms about Mrs. Clarke, told her as gently as she could of Mr. Demry's advent into the alley fourteen years before, of his friendship with the children, his occasional lapses from grace, and the steady decline of his fortune.

"We must get him away from here!" cried Mrs. Clarke when she had gained control of herself. "Go somewhere and telephone Mr. Clarke. Telephone Dr. Adair. Tell him to bring an ambulance and another nurse and—and plenty of blankets. Telephone to the house for them to get a room ready. But wait—there's Mac—he mustn't know—"

It was the old, old mother-cry! Keep it from Mac, spare Mac, don't let Mac suffer. Nance seized on it now to further her designs.

"You go back to Mr. Mac, Mrs. Clarke. I'll stay here and attend to everything. You go ahead and get things ready for us."

And Mrs. Clarke, used to taking the easiest way, allowed herself to be persuaded, and after one agonized look at the tranquil face on the pillow, hurried away.

Nance, shivering with the cold, got together the few articles that constituted Mr. Demry's worldly possessions. A few shabby garments in the old wardrobe, the miniature on the shelf, a stack of well-worn books, and the violin in its rose-wood case. Everything else had been sold to keep the feeble flame alive in that wasted old form.

Nance looked about her with swimming eyes. She recalled the one happy Christmas that her childhood had known. The gay garlands of tissue paper, the swinging lanterns, the shelf full of oranges and doughnuts, and the beaming old face smiling over the swaying fiddle bow! And to think that Mrs. Clarke's own father had hidden away here all these years, utterly friendless except for the children, poor to the point of starvation, sick to the point of death, grappling with his great weakness in heroic silence, and going down to utter oblivion rather than obtrude his misfortune upon the one he loved best.

As the old man's fairy tales had long ago stirred Nance's imagination and wakened her to the beauty of invisible things, so now his broken, futile life, with its one great glory of renunciation, called out to the soul of her and roused in her a strange, new sense of spiritual beauty.

For one week he lived among the luxurious surroundings of his daughter's home. Everything that skill and money could do, was done to restore him to health and sanity. But he saw only the sordid sights he had been seeing for the past fourteen years; he heard only the sounds to which his old ears had become accustomed.

"You would better move my cot, Nancy," he would say, plucking at the silken coverlid. "They are scrubbing the floor up in the Lavinski flat. The water always comes through." And again he would say: "It is nice and warm in here, but I am afraid you are burning too much coal, dear. I cannot get another bucket until Saturday."

One day Mrs. Clarke saw him take from his tray, covered with delicacies, a half-eaten roll and slip it under his pillow.

"We must save it," he whispered confidentially, "save it for to-morrow." In vain they tried to reassure him; the haunting poverty that had stalked beside him in life refused to be banished by death.

Mrs. Clarke remained "the lady" to him to the end. When he spoke to her, his manner assumed a faint dignity, with a slight touch of gallantry, the unmistakable air of a gentleman of the old school towards an attractive stranger of the opposite sex.

His happiest hours were those when he fancied the children were with him.

"Gently! gently!" he would say; "there is room for everybody. This knee is for Gussie Gorman, this one for Joe, because they are the smallest, you know. Now are you ready?" And then he would whisper fairy stories, smiling at the ceiling, and making feeble gestures with his wasted old hands.

The end came one day after he had lain for hours in a stupor. He stirred suddenly and asked for his violin.

"I must go—to the—theater, Nancy," he murmured. "I—do not want—to be—a—burden."

They laid the instrument in his arms, and his fingers groped feebly over the strings; then his chin sank into its old accustomed place, and a great light dawned in his eyes. Mr. Demry, who was used to seeing invisible things, had evidently caught the final vision.

That night, worn with nursing and full of grief for the passing of her old friend, Nance threw a coat about her and slipped out on the terrace. Above her, nebulous stars were already appearing, and their twinkling was answered by responsive gleams in the city below. Against the velvety dusk two tall objects towered in the distance, the beautiful Gothic spire of the cathedral, and the tall, unseemly gas pipe of Clarke's Bottle Factory. Between them, under a haze of smoke and grime, lay Calvary Alley.

"I don't know which is worse," thought Nance fiercely, "to be down there in the mess, fighting and struggling and suffering to get the things you want, or up here with the mummies who haven't got anything left to wish for. I wish life wasn't just a choice between a little hard green apple and a rotten big one!"

She leaned her elbows on the railing and watched the new moon dodging behind the tree trunks and, as she watched, she grappled with the problem of life, at first bitterly and rebelliously, then with a dawning comprehension of its meaning. After all was the bishop, with his conspicuous virtues and his well-known dislike of children, any better than old Mr. Demry, with his besetting sin and his beautiful influence on every child with whom he came in contact? Was Mr. Clarke, working children under age in the factory to build up a great fortune for his son, very different from Mr. Lavinski, with his sweat-shop, hoarding pennies for the ambitious Ikey? Was Mrs. Clarke, shirking her duty to her father, any happier or any better than Mrs. Snawdor, shirking hers to her children? Was Mac, adored and petted and protected, any better than Birdie, now in the state asylum paying the penalty of their joint misdeed? Was the tragedy in the great house back of her any more poignant than the tragedy of Dan Lewis bound by law to an insane wife and burdened with a child that was not his own? She seemed to see for the first time the great illuminating truth that the things that make men alike in the world are stronger than the things that make them different. And in this realization an overwhelming ambition seized her. Some hidden spiritual force rose to lift her out of the contemplation of her own interests into something of ultimate value to her fellowmen.

After all, those people down there in Calvary Alley were her people, and she meant to stand by them. It had been the dream of her life to get out and away, but in that moment she knew that wherever she went, she would always come back. Others might help from the top, but she could help understandingly from the bottom. With the magnificent egotism of youth, she outlined gigantic schemes on the curtain of the night. Some day, somehow, she would make people like the Clarkes see the life of the poor as it really was, she would speak for the girls in the factories, in the sweatshops, on the stage. She would be an interpreter between the rich and the poor and make them serve each other.