The Dancer at the Cabarin

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

 

The Dancer
at the
Cabarin

By Mary Roberts Rinehart

Illustrated by Henry Raleigh

T WAS New Year's Eve at the Bal Tabarin in Vienna.

In the center of the long room the girl from Budapest was dancing. She was a tall girl, lithe and supple, and she danced to a clamor of little bells—bells on her garters, bells around her waist, bells concealed that tinkled as she swayed, and protested shrilly when she leaped. Her sensuous dancing pleased the crowd; as she ceased, smiling, with a flash of dark eyes and white teeth, a tipsy officer in uniform presented her with a glass of champagne.

The wild Hungarian music rioted. The musicians, in red coats, with swarthy faces, played furiously. With the near approach of midnight a frenzy seized the crowd. The merriment of the carnival was giving place to something less innocent. A man in a loge drank from a woman's slipper.

The loges circled the room. From their railings, red plush and gilt, streamed long thin festoons of colored paper. The air was filled with flying confetti. As a gong announced five minutes before the hour the crowd, tired of the decorum of the tables, surged toward the boxes, where women sat, smothered in flowers—fair women and dark, aigrettes and jewels, gleaming flesh and cool, amused eyes. Behind their white shoulders men lounged, men in court dress or uniform with medals of honor on their breasts.

OUTSIDE, in the streets, and gathered before St. Stephen's Church, a reverent crowd stood in the snow. At the first stroke of midnight the people crossed themselves, and many knelt. But in the Bal Tabarin the noise only grew more boisterous, the music more riotous. Confetti were abandoned for flying flowers—roses and violets, carnations and lilies. The loges were ankle deep in crushed petals. Amid shrieks of laughter a chimney sweep, in official coat and rags, carried a squealing pig from loge to loge.

Behind the bar, at the top of the steps leading from the boxes to the main floor, an English barmaid was sharpening a lead pencil.

A thin young American girl in a dancing dress stood beside her, leaning both elbows on the bar and surveying the scene with frank curiosity.

"Look at the diamond collar on that woman over there with the bandeau!" she said. "Seems to me diamond collars are taking the place of necklaces this winter."

"I'm glad you spoke of that, Tilly." The barmaid yawned and stuck her pencil in her hair. "I'll have some of my stuff made over."

Tilly Reilly laughed. "What's the pig for?" she demanded.

"Luck. They don't look as if they needed it, do they?"

Tilly's eyes had gone back again to the woman with the bandeau.

"I wonder," she reflected, "how I'd look with a black velvet collar like that and a paste buckle on it. I'm so infernally thin!"

TILLY said "infernally." There is strong reason to believe that she would have said "damnably" had it occurred to her. The world had not been kind to Tilly in her nineteen years, and, although she was still sound and fine, there were scratches on her social veneer. Stranded in Europe by the failure of a roving company, in which she had belonged to the chorus, Tilly had refused with loathing the means many of the girls had chosen to get back, and had drifted into the cabarets as the best of a bad job.

For three months now she had been a part of the night life of the city, a dancer at the Tabarin, a familiar figure to rounders, an enigma to the other girls of the cabaret. For Tilly showed a curious willingness to live on her forty kronen a week salary, a hitherto unknown tendency to mind her own business, and an aloofness that was helped by her ignorance of the language.

TO-NIGHT, on this Silvesterabend, Tilly's eyes, as she stared over the revelers, were somewhat clouded. For her contract at the Tabarin expired that night, and she had every reason to believe that it would not be renewed. And when one is making a conscientious effort to live on forty kronen a week and no extras, and has no one to cable to for money—or, for that matter, no money to cable—and has wasted one's substance in riotous living to the extent of a kronen or so every week, a kronen being twenty cents, losing one's job is serious enough.

Tilly's innocence was not ignorance. She knew why she was to be dismissed. Her graceful dancing, totally lacking in fire or sensuality, made no appeal to the satiated habitués of the Bal Tabarin: her aloofness irritated them. A man one night had held Tilly tight and tried to kiss her, whereat Tilly had bitten his hand until it bled.

Weininger, the proprietor, had stormed in German, and Tilly, gathering something of his meaning, and desperately alone, had done her best. She had shortened her shabby skirts and, even after a battle royal, consented to dance in her bare feet. The result was curious, incongruous—Tilly, dressed like a bacchante, danced her virginal little dance with shamed, downcast eyes, a travesty of bacchanalia, a child repeating passion by rote.

AND now Tilly was at her last ditch. Before long, at dawn probably, Weininger would dismiss her—not pay her off, for Tilly had drawn her salary ahead, being given to the aforesaid riotous living, and having at Christmas, the week before, presented to the children of the portier at her pension, the only Christmas they had received. Also Tilly had made herself a present of a chiffon waist. Undoubtedly, Tilly had been extravagant. She did not yet know whether her delight in the waist was not eclipsed by her pain at her improvidence.

Tilly, dressed like a bacchante, danced her virginal little dance with shamed, downcast eyes, a child repeating passion by rote

.

Weininger would dismiss her probably at daylight, and she would have to mint another job, and if that failed—she shuddered and closed her eyes. She had passed women in the gray dawn standing on the street corners—sometimes a group mar a grating, for warmth. Tilly had always passed them with horror in her eyes, and now perhaps in a night or two—or a week or a month, depending on her resistance, and how long she could go hungry—

"Hell of a racket, isn't it?" observed the barmaid perfunctorily. "I wish I could get a cup of tea somewhere. Sometimes I—look in that box over there! Aren't they Americans?"

Tilly looked across to where, in a loge, a young woman was sitting. Beside her, laughing and pelting the crowd below with roses, were two men in evening dress. One, the younger, was looking across at Tilly.

"Look like it," said Tilly indifferently. She had grown familiar with touring Americans seeing the sights of the night city; she had ceased to expect anything but curiosity from the women and overt familiarity from the men. "Look like New Yorkers. You can tell New York clothes far as you can see them."

In the recurrence of the performance Tilly's turn was approaching again. She stooped under the bar and brought up a box of rouge and a broken mirror. Careless of onlookers, she touched up her round young cheeks, crimsoned her lips a trifle more, and put fresh powder in the hollows that a thirty-kronen-a-week pension had left in her neck.

The Cossack dancers, a man and two girls, were finishing. The rhythmic beat of their heavy boots on the floor raised a light cloud of dust. Hampered by the encroaching tables, they danced furiously, giving vent to the curious shrill cries of the steppes. Tilly kicked off her shabby slippers and examined the sole of one bare foot.

"I picked up a rose thorn the last time," she remarked. "And some one has broken a wineglass. I wish they'd sweep the floor."

THE barmaid was large and very blond. To-night, with nothing but champagne on sale, she was not busy, having only the waiters' checks to look after. She pinned a pink rose in her bosom, and looked at Tilly with not unfriendly eyes.

"Have you seen Weininger?" she asked. "He was looking for you."

"I'm right here when he wants me." Tilly's tone was defiant. The blond barmaid leaned over and put a hand on her arm.

"Take it from me," she said, "you do what he wants. You're a long ways from home, kid. You can dance all right. I've watched you, and I know. But you've got to put some snap into it to-night if you want to hold your job. You dance like a Sunday school!"

She pushed Tilly toward the steps with a kindly contempt. But Tilly turned, speaking over her thin shoulder:

"Tell Weininger, for me, to go to the devil!" she said, and advanced delicately on her bare toes to the top of the half dozen stairs leading down to the floor. She stopped there a moment or two. looking out over the crowd. And, lingering there, her indifferent eyes fell on the loge across and met those of one of the men. He was watching her, and now he smiled. It was a smile, not a leer. Tilly smiled back at him with a flash of amusement in her Irish eyes. It was as if their glances had met in a mutual, amused tolerance of the scene that lay between them. Where Tilly had been reared the Godspeed of a smile between strangers was not necessarily evil.

"What a pretty little dancer!" said the woman in the box. "She looks Irish, doesn't she?"

"American, I think; I'll tell you in a moment."

The young man who had smiled at Tilly bent over and selected some flowers from the mass on the table. From across, Tilly watched him soberly. First he held up a red rose, smiling over it at her. Then he added to it a white carnation and held both up. Something of expectancy gleamed in Tilly's blue eyes.

Finally, after much searching, he found a blue violet, and with a little air of triumph extended the red, white, and blue cluster. Tilly smiled again, showing her small teeth, and nodded vigorously. The young woman in the box bent over at that and bowed. It was a little low, as if she had said over all the heads: "My countrywoman, greetings."

"She looks like Botticelli's Spring!" said the woman in the box. "How exquisitely proportioned she is, and look at her feet! Did you ever see such beautiful feet?"

The younger man said nothing, but he bent forward, watching Tilly.

"She looks quite—nice, too." The woman again: "What a horrible place for her to be!"

The older man laughed and signaled the waiter for more champagne. "One sees those things in Europe," he said tolerantly. "These cabaret girls are all alike—bad clear through. But some of them are like that—little devils with the eyes of saints."

Tilly looked across again. The kindliness in the younger man's eyes had not faded. And now he called the Kellner and pointed out a broken wineglass on the dancing floor. The Kellner bowed and departed. A lit- tle wave of warmth and well-being stole over Tilly's lonely heart. Some one was solicitous for her—some one who wished nothing of her, who did not leer, but smiled. Something that had seemed to have stifled in the smoke of the Bal Tabarin, or died of starvation en pension at thirty kronen a week, suddenly awakened to life in Tilly's breast, a something that was not afraid of the gray women on the street corners, a something that could smile in the tainted air of the Bal Tabarin. and slip, unscathed, from under the clutching fingers of the birds of prey that haunted it. And the something hated Tilly's bare legs and shortened skirts and the dance that was an imitation of the girl from Budapest.

The Cossack dancers had finished. Their athletic dancing received scant applause. The crowd, stimulated to the highest point, desired an appeal to its senses, roused with wine. In some of the boxes men sat with their arms around the shoulders of the women. The leader of the orchestra was waiting, his eyes on Tilly. Behind the musicians, near a pillar, she could see Weininger, his heavy black brows drawn together, watching her. Tilly padded down the steps in her bare feet and stood with her arms poised, waiting for the music. And. as she stood, the American flung the tiny red, white, and blue nosegay to her. She stooped and picked it up.

TILLY was not a heroine. She was only a girl who had been driven hard, and who now, in the enemy's country, stood with her back to the wall. Or perhaps it was a ditch, after all, not a wall. With the flowers in her hand, Tilly danced, danced in her thin short skirt and her bare legs. But with Weininger glowering at her, showing his teeth, with the women in the loges sneering and the men disappointed and bored, to the sensuous Hungarian music Tilly danced again the virginal little dance of her early days at the Bal Tabarin, looking, as she did it, like cool spring come again in the midst of hot, voluptuous summer.

And when she had finished, without a glance at the man in the box, she gathered her rouge and her broken mirror from under the bar, and disdaining Weininger's fury and the thought of the pension at thirty kronen a week—and no thirty kronen—she shook the dust of the Bal Tabarin from her feet.

The night was very cold, and Tilly's street garments were thin. As the doorkeeper let her out into the street one of the eternal gray figures on the corner moved, only to fall back into the shadow. Tilly's mood was exalted. She felt in her purse and found two kronen, and, holding them out, she faced the shadow. She spoke no German, but her gesture needed no interpreter.

"For heaven's sake, go home and go to bed!" she said. "You make me nervous."

TILLY slept late the next morning. She crawled out into her cold room and put a handful of coal in the tile stove, lighting it with kindlings the size of matches and a bit of paper. Then she went back to bed until the fire should make an impression on the temperature of the cold room, and sitting up, with her ulster around her shoulders, she examined her feet.

They were covered with scratches from the rose thorns of the night before, and one toe had been badly cut by glass. Not only that, but a streak of red ran from the toe up to the arch of Tilly's foot. Tilly looked at it in dismay.

"Wouldn't that scald you?" she demanded, plaintively, aloud.

She sat for some time looking at the foot. In Tilly's business, feet are of primary importance, meaning, as they do, clothing to wear, a shelter over one's head, and pension, at say thirty kronen—or six dollars a week. Not that Tilly's pension was worth that sum, but Tilly's occupation being precarious as well as dubious, and times being hard, as they always are in Austria, she paid the usual percentage of her youth, inexperience, and friendlessness. So now she looked at her right foot and whistled.

She stepped out onto the cold wood floor. Both feet were painful, the right one hardly more than the left. She got a rag and some cold cream, and tied up the cut, and then hobbled to the bell and rang for her coffee. To supplement the meager pension coffee and roll—for Tilly was a healthy young animal—she got an egg from the washstand drawer, and filled a tin cup with water from the pitcher. The little red, white, and blue bouquet came out with the water, and Tilly picked it up and looked at it.

THE flowers and her bad foot, and not having had her coffee yet, which is enough to make the strongest soul pallid, got rather on her nerves. She put the egg inside the stove to cook, and then she sat down, with her ulster over her nightgown, and looked the said pallid soul in the face. She had been a fool, and she knew it. If she had pleased Weininger last night, he would have looked after her until her foot got better. And now here she was, far from home—Tilly was vague about how far she was from home, but it was far enough—and out of a job. Why? Because a man she would never see again—and she wished to heaven she'd never laid eyes on him—had smiled at her across the Bal Tabarin.

Tilly's egg cooked quite hard and her coffee, put down with a slam outside her door, grew cold, while she sat there, hating the young man. Why shouldn't a girl dance in her bare legs? Didn't dozens of girls do it? But what was the use of sitting there like a fool, anyhow? She'd never dance again. She'd probably lie there and starve, or they would take her to the Allgemeine Krankenhous and cut off her leg. At this Tilly cried a little, and ate her egg, cooked as hard as a stone.

She cleaned up her room, having a strong instinct for tidiness, and she soaked her foot in hot water. By noon she was more cheerful, and she manicured her nails. But her foot was worse. She could hardly walk. Dancing was out of the question, perhaps for a week, possibly more.

She sat before her shabby toilet table, with her heavy brown hair about her shoulders, and looked at herself in the glass, and went over the situation. She knew she was pretty: dressed like the women in the boxes the night before, she would have been beautiful. She even put her hair up in a great loose knot, as she had seen the woman with the diamond collar wear it, and slipped a pink garter around as a bandeau. The effect was ravishing.

Whereon Tilly took the garter and put it in the stove, with a feeling of purifying her thoughts and putting temptation behind her, and was obliged to tie up her stocking with an old ribbon.

She limped out to the pension dining room, and ate her boiled meat and fruit compote and creamed carrots and afterward she told the landlady, with the aid of a German dictionary, that she had been "fired," causing great confusion in that person's breast, until she learned that "fired" did not mean combustion, and that Tilly meant "dismissed." Whereat the confusion ceased and became purpose, said purpose being to get rid of Tilly as soon as possible. This she did, in gestures that required no dictionary.

When she saw him, or perhaps before she saw him, the horror of what she was doing came over the girl like a cloud

TILLY crowded a shoe over her aching foot, put on her gathered up her shabby little muff, and limped out. She had not a krone to her name, and she was a vague but sufficient number of miles—somewhere in the thousands—from home. Although "home" to Tilly meant the United States, "home" as consisting of so many rooms with hot and cold water, cabinet mantels, and cemented cellar, was something she did not possess.

She went to the Prater that afternoon, and sat on a bench watching the carriages go by. Once she saw the woman who had worn the bandeau the night before. She was in ermine from head to foot, hat, muff, and long coat. Pinned to her muff was a great cluster of fresh violets. Tilly's contemptuous smile was a bit tremulous. She had nothing to eat, of course, and her foot was hurting more—she hoped it was only the cold.

At dusk an officer in uniform, sauntering by, stopped and looked at her. Then he said something in German; Tilly was glad she did not understand. She looked past him, frigidly, and he went on, shrugging his shoulders. He had only asked her if she was cold, and would like a cup of coffee, but Tilly was in arms against the world. Perhaps, most of all, Tilly was in arms against herself. She was afraid of where hunger and cold and loneliness might drive her. She was alone in Vienna: she had no friends and no money. She could not even speak the language. No doubt there were places, even in that most medieval of cities, where she might have applied for help and received it. But Tilly's idea of relief was the Actors' Fund on the other side of the globe.

At ten o'clock that night Tilly limped to the Bal Tabarin and asked to see the barmaid. The doorkeeper would not admit her, and said roughly in bad English that the barmaid was not there. Tilly did not believe him. She staggered away, back to her bench in the park, and lapsed into a sort of stupor from cold and discouragement.

IT WAS almost midnight when a policeman roused her and made her move on. She was acutely wretched. Her foot was increasingly painful. Long before she had unfastened the buttons, but the torture of the swollen toe persisted. She was not starving, but she was weak with hunger and numb with cold. Still, her determination did not give way. All that was gone was her perspective: she could see only two ways out of her wretchedness, and one was unthinkable. The other—?

They were covered with scratches from the rose thorns of the night before, and one toe had been badly cut by glass

She turned toward the Prater lake and made her way there slowly along a snow-covered path. She was shaking with fright, but her determination held. There were only two ways out. This was one, the other being unthinkable. She said, over and over, mechanically, "I'll die first." She even heard herself saying it.

And so, limping and shivering, she reached the bank of the Prater lake.

She would not look at the water. She put her muff on the ground, and tried with her stiff fingers to take out her hatpins. She was past thinking: certainly there was no reason for saving the hat. And then, suddenly, her eyes fell on the lake, and she broke into choking, hysterical laughter.

This way was closed. The lake was frozen, solid.

HAVING seen his sister and her husband off for the opera, Sullivan had his evening free. He went to a theatre, and found his meager knowledge of German, complicated by the atrocious Wiener dialect, inadequate. Had he been quite frank with himself, he would have acknowledged that he was only passing the time until the Bal Tabarin opened after the opera.

Sullivan had thought, at frequent intervals during the day, of Tilly Reilly—not, of course, that he called her Tilly Reilly. He had thought mostly of her eyes, eyes that did not belong to the Bal Tabarin, eyes that had smiled frankly into his, eyes that had dropped demurely as she danced. And the dance! The daintiness of it, the modesty which made her slim young legs and feet, in their scant white draperies, so childish. And this flower of spring in that hothouse of vice!

Sullivan went to the Bal Tabarin. He was very early. Instead of a loge, he took a table near the center of the room, and sat back, smoking a cigarette and watching the place fill up, first with citizens bringing portly wives and ordering cheap Austrian wines, then officers, students in corps caps, a loge full of Chinese from the embassy, and last, for effect, the aristocracy of the half world, who came here, night after night, showing their beauty in the loges like merchants shrewdly placing their goods on display.

Sullivan found them uninteresting. He was much more absorbed in the dancing floor. From where he sat, he could see how the heavy boots of the Russian dancers had splintered the wood. What a place for that child in her bare feet! And last night there had been broken glass.

HE WATCHED with more eagerness than he would have cared to admit for Tilly. With the informality of the cabaret, the performers lounged around the doorways or mixed with the crowd. At a table in the corner three English girls, who did a clog dance and sang an English music-hall song or two, sat talking together, One of them was crocheting: one, a thin girl, wore a woolen shawl over her shoulders and coughed steadily. Their costumes were dirty: their eyes hard and calculating.

The Apache dancers did their turn, with much pulling and twisting, much flying of skirts and revealing of hideous lingerie and thick cotton stockings. A colored boy, fresh from Georgia, sang ragtime to the mad enthusiasm of the crowd. But Tilly did not appear. Sullivan ordered tobacco, another pint of white wine. The atmosphere was reeking: the incessant uproar of the orchestra got on his nerves. When it became clear that the program had reached its end, and was about to repeat, Sullivan got up and sauntered to the bar. He had seen Tilly talking to the barmaid the night before.

But the barmaid was a different one, a black-haired French girl. She said, with a shrug of her shoulders, that the Fraulein was krank and was not there to-night. She knew nothing of Tilly, and made poor work of understanding him. In a sort of rage of disappointment he got his hat and overcoat, and left the building. His anger was partly at least at himself, that he should be so interested in this chit of a girl, who was doubtless, as his brother-in-law had said, "a little devil with the eyes of a saint"; anger that he should have made himself conspicuous by asking for her; that he should be leaving with a feeling of failure at not having seen her.

He refused a cab. A fine white snow was falling in the narrow streets. At the corner a woman was standing, head bent to the storm, looking, in the wind, like some gray night bird, waiting and ominous. With a shudder of disgust, Sullivan buttoned up his coat and turned to start.

He had taken perhaps a dozen steps when a slim figure stepped out from the shadow of the building, and put a timid hand on his arm. Sullivan stopped sharply and shook off the hand. The light from a street lamp, at that moment, by some caprice of the wind, cleared of snow, fell on the girl's face. It was Tilly, Tilly, quivering, as white as chalk.

SULLIVAN faced her, almost as white as she. When she saw him, or perhaps before she saw him, the horror of what she was doing came over the girl like a cloud.

"Mother of God!" she gasped, and turning, ran, with all the speed of her cold limbs and aching feet, down the street, with Sullivan after her.

He overtook her in a dozen strides, caught her by the shoulder and wheeled her about to face him. Even in that instant, his anger had turned to pity.

"I'm not going to hurt you, child," he said. "I am only—what are you doing out here in the storm?"

Tilly swayed, somewhat, and closed her eyes. Desperate as she was, she felt the shaken depths in the man's voice.

"I am going to take you home." Tilly stirred at that.

"Home!" The word brought bitterness with it. She jerked her arm free. "You let me go!" she cried, shrilly. "If I want to go to the devil, it's my business, isn't it? I don't want pity. I only want to be let alone."

Sullivan looked down at her. His eyes were still kind, but something had faded out of them; perhaps it was faith that had gone.

"To think," he said slowly, "that last night I thought—I would have sworn that you—"

And at that, without warning, Tilly burst into loud, hysterical sobbing.

"I never did it in my life before!" she choked. "Never! Never!"

The snow was falling heavily now. Out of the white wall an occasional cab emerged to lose itself a moment later. Laughter and music, and the rhythm of dancing feet, came through doors that opened and shut. In the night city, no one is curious: each is intent on his own affairs. And so, undisturbed, Sullivan let Tilly cry out her tortured young soul on his shoulder.

After a time she grew quieter. He hardly knew what to do. He could take her to his sister—meant to, of course—but not at that hour of the night. He must get her under shelter somewhere. Asked where she lived, she said, "Nowhere," and told her brief little story between dry sobs. Sullivan, at his wits' end, called a cab and helped her into it. It was when she crossed the pavement that he saw how lame she was. At the memory of her slim bare feet and the splintered floor at the Bal Tabarin he swore under his breath.

HE TOOK her to a small hotel which the cabman, with a leer, suggested. The character of the place troubled Sullivan no whit. He wanted to see the girl comfortable, and fed, and more than all, mentally normal again. There was no lift. He and a portier assisted her up the stairs, and laid her on a bed in a tawdry little room. Although it was after two in the morning, the portier brought some hot soup, and Sullivan, drawing up a chair, fed her by spoonfuls.

Tilly lay back with closed eyes and open, childish mouth. When the soup was done, she looked at Sullivan gratefully.

"I didn't know there were men like you in the world." She held out her hand to him, and he took it between both of his.

"I thought all men were rotters," she said, sighing happily. "You—you're the best man I have ever known." Sullivan flushed uncomfortably.

"I guess the average is higher than you think," he said. "Sure you are warm enough?"

"Fine."

"Foot feel better?"

"It aches—some," she admitted.

"Don't you think you'd better take off your shoe and look at it?"

"I will—" she hesitated. "If you will turn your back."

Sullivan gravely went to the window and stood, his back to her, while she took off her shoe with a sigh of relief, and then her stocking. The foot was swollen. "It looks pretty bad. Would you—perhaps you'd better look and see if it is poisoned?"

SULLIVAN came over and looked down judicially. Then he stooped and poked lightly at the swelling with awkward fingers. "It looks bad enough, poor little foot!" he said gently. "We'll have a doctor to look at it in the morning."

"I can't lose it," wistfully. "If I can't dance again, I—" Her chin quivered.

Sullivan looked at her.

"What if you can't dance again?"

Tilly met his eyes.

"I'll starve to death," she said simply.

She went to sleep almost immediately after that, one arm thrown up over her head, the other across her childish breast. Sullivan lowered the light, creaking around on his toes to avoid waking her. Then he drew a chair close beside the bed, and sat looking at her, at her eyelids, blue-veined and black-lashed, at the purity of her mouth, the sweetness and character of her chin, at the swollen foot, lying on a pillow, with the fine scratches on the sole. And, with the intuition that comes to a man so surely because so seldom, Sullivan knew that the scratches were all of evil that Tilly had carried away from the Bal Tabarin.

Heavy footsteps outside on the tiled corridor threatened to rouse the girl from her sleep. He rose and stood looking down at her. He had an impulse to stoop and kiss her on the forehead, but he did not. Instead, he carried his chair into the hall and sat down, sentinel fashion, just outside the door.

The light from a gas lamp wavered in the draft, faintly illuminating the stone stairs, with their twisted iron baluster. Laughter and music came up the staircase well, but he heard neither. His thoughts had gone ahead to a future in which this girl, this waif he had gathered from the streets, should have her part: to take her back to the homeland, to care for her and cherish her, to see her growing into that purity of womanhood that was her birthright, and then, perhaps, some day to go to her and ask for her love—

It was almost morning. In the Bal Tabarin the girl from Budapest was dancing for the last time. The little bells on her garters tinkled as she swayed. Late as it was, the wild Hungarian music still rioted. As she ceased dancing, an army officer in uniform presented her with a glass of champagne.

TILLY roused from sleep at dawn, and lay a moment, remembering. Then, with her heart beating fast, she limped to the door and opened it. Outside, Sullivan was sleeping in his chair, his head dropped forward.

Tilly stood looking at him with shining eyes. When he slept on, she slipped forward and, dropping on her knees silently, put her lips to the sleeve of Sullivan's New York-made dress coat. Then, flushed and palpitating, she fled back to the room, and stood leaning against the door, trembling, with shining eyes.

"You dear!" she whispered to the door panel. "You dear! I'm dippy about you!"