Jack got up from his chair, put his hands in his pockets, and looked
at her curiously. This Nell Montgomery, this music-hall "dance and song
girl," this girl of whom so much had been SAID and so little PROVED!
Well, this was becoming interesting.

"You don't understand," she said, with nervous feverishness; "you
remember after that row I had with Jim, that night the manager gave us a
supper,--when he treated me like a dog?"

"He did that," interrupted Jack.

"I felt fit for anything," she said, with a half-hysterical laugh, that
seemed voiced, however, to check some slumbering memory. "I'd have cut
my throat or his, it didn't matter which"--

"It mattered something to us, Nell," put in Jack again, with polite
parenthesis; "don't leave US out in the cold."

"I started from 'Frisco that night on the boat ready to fling myself
into anything--or the river!" she went on hurriedly. "There was a man
in the cabin who noticed me, and began to hang around. I thought he
knew who I was,--had seen me on the posters; and as I didn't feel like
foolin', I told him so. But he wasn't that kind. He said he saw I was in
trouble and wanted me to tell him all."

Mr. Hamlin regarded her cheerfully. "And you told him," he said, "how
you had once run away from your childhood's happy home to go on the
stage! How you always regretted it, and would have gone back but that
the doors were shut forever against you! How you longed to leave, but
the wicked men and women around you always"--