When the thing was at its hottest, I bolted. Tom, like the darling he is—(Yes, you are, old fellow, you're as precious to me as—as you are to the police—if they could only get their hands on you)—well, Tom drew off the crowd, having passed the old gentleman's watch to me, and I made for the women's rooms. The station was crowded, as it always is in the afternoon, and in a minute I was strolling into the big, square room, saying slowly to myself to keep me steady: "Nancy, you're a college girl—ju

Yes, empty-handed, Tom Dorgan. And I can't honestly say I didn't have the chance, but—if my hands are empty my head is full. Listen. There's a girl I know with short brown hair, a turned-up nose and gray eyes, rather far apart. You know her, too? Well, she can't help that. But this girl—oh, she makes such a pretty boy! And the ladies at the hotel over in Brooklyn, they just dote on her when she's not only a boy but a bell-boy. Her name may be Nancy when she's in petticoats, but in trousers she's

Oh, Mag, Mag, for heaven's sake, let me talk to you! No, don't say anything. You must let me tell you. No—don't call the other girls. I can't bear to tell this to anybody but you. You know how I kicked when Tom hit on Latimer's as the place we were to scuttle. And the harder I kicked the stubborner he got, till he swore he'd do the job without me if I wouldn't come along. Well—this is the rest of it. The house, you know, stands at the end of the street. If you could walk through the garden with

No—no—no! No more whining from Nance Olden. Listen to what I've got to tell you, Mag, listen! You know where I was coming from yesterday when I passed Troyon's window and grinned up at you, sitting there, framed in bottles of hair tonic, with all that red wig of yours streaming about you? Yep, from that little, rat-eyed lawyer's office. I was glum as mud. I felt as though Tom and myself were both flies caught by the leg—he by the law and I by the lawyer—in a sticky mess; and the more we flapped

Do you remember Lady Patronesses' Day at the Cruelty, Mag? Remember how the place smelt of cleaning ammonia on the bare floors? Remember the black dresses we all wore, and the white aprons with the little bibs, and the oily sweetness of the matron, and how our faces shone and tingled from the soap and the rubbing? Remember it all? Well, who'd 'a' thought then that Nance Olden ever would make use of it—on the level, too! Drop the Cruelty, and tell you about the stage? Why, it's bare boards back t

I got into the train, Mag, the happiest girl in all the country. I'd a big basket of things for Tom. I was got up in my Sunday best, for I wanted to make a hit with some fellow with a key up there, who'd make things soft and easy for my Tommy. I had so much to tell him. I knew just how I'd take off every member of the company to amuse him. I had memorized every joke I'd heard since I'd got behind the curtain—not very hard for me; things always had a way of sticking in my mind. I knew the newest

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

No wonder Obermuller was raging. I looked at him. You don't like to tackle a fellow like that when he's dancing hot. And yet you ache to help him and—yes, yourself. "Lord Harold's here yet, and the jewels?" I asked. He gave a short nod. He was thinking. But so was I. "Then all he wants is a Lady?" "That's all," he said sarcastically. "Well, what's the matter with me?" He gasped. "There's nothing the matter with your nerve, Olden." "Thank you, so much." It was the way Gray says it when she tries

Is that you, Mag? Well, it's about time you came home to look after me. Fine chaperon you make, Miss Monahan! Why, didn't I tell you the very day we took this flat what a chaperon was, and that you'd have to be mine? Imagine Nancy Olden without a chaperon—Shocking! No, 'tisn't late. Sit down, Maggie, there, and let me get the stool and talk to you. Think of us two—Cruelty girls, both of us—two mangy kittens deserted by the old cats in a city's alleys, and left mewing with cold and hunger and dir

It's all come so quick, Maggie, and it was over so soon that I hardly remember the beginning. Nobody on earth could have expected it less than I, when I came off in the afternoon. I don't know what I was thinking of as I came into my dressing-room, that used to be Gray's—the sight of him seemed to cut me off from myself as with a knife—but it wasn't of him. It may have been that I was chuckling to myself at the thought of Nancy Olden with a dressing-room all to herself. I can't ever quite get us

There I was seated in a box all alone—Miss Nancy Olden, by courtesy of the management, come to listen to the leading lady sing coon-songs, that I might add her to my collection of take-offs. She's a fat leading lady, very fair and nearly fifty, I guess. But she's got a rollicking, husky voice in her fat throat that's sung the dollars down deep into her pockets. They say she's planted them deeper still—in the foundations of apartment houses—and that now she's the richest roly-poly on the Rialto.

"Don't you think you'd better get out of this?" I asked Obermuller, as he came into the station a few minutes after I got there. "No." "I do." "Because?" "Because it won't do you any good to have your name mixed up with a thing like this." "But it might do you some good." I didn't answer for a minute after that. I sat in my chair, my eyes bent on the floor. I counted the cracks between the chair and the floor of the office where the Chief was busy with another case. I counted them six times, bac

When Obermuller sent for me I thought he wanted to see me about that play he's writing in which I'm to star—when the pigs begin to fly. Funniest thing in the world about that man, Mag. He knows he can't get bookings for any play on earth; that if he did they'd be canceled and any old excuse thrown at him, as soon as Tausig heard of it and could put on the screws. He knows that there isn't an unwatched hole in theatrical America through which he can crawl and pull me and the play in after him. An

Just what I'd been hoping for I don't know, but I knew that my chance had come that morning. For a week I had been talking Obermuller's comedy to Mason, the secretary. In the evenings I stood about in the wings and watched the Van Twiller company in Brambles. There was one fat role in it that I just ached for, but I lost all that ache and found another, when I overheard two of the women talking about Obermuller and me one night. "He found her and made her," one of 'em said; "just dug her out of

He started as though he couldn't believe his eyes when he saw me. "The Lord hath delivered mine enemy into my hand," shone in his evil little face. "Why, Mr. Tausig," I cried, before he could get his breath. "How odd to meet you here! Did you find a baby, too?" "Did I find—" He glared at me. "I find you; that's enough. Now—" "But the luncheon was to be at twelve-thirty," I laughed. "And I haven't changed my dress yet." "You'll change it all right for something not so becoming if you don't shell

Ah me, Maggie, the miserable Nance that went away from that station! To have had your future in your grasp, like that one of the Fates with the string, and then to have it snatched from you by an impish breeze and blown away, goodness knows where! I don't know just which way I turned after I left that station. I didn't care where I went. Nothing I could think of gave me any comfort. I tried to fancy myself coming home to you. I tried to see myself going down to tell the whole thing to Obermuller

I don't remember much about the first part of the lunch. I was so hungry I wanted to eat everything in sight, and so happy that I couldn't eat a thing. But Mr. O. kept piling the things on my plate, and each time I began to talk he'd say: "Not now—wait till you're rested, and not quite so famished." I laughed. "Do I eat as though I was starved?" "You—you look tired, Nance." "Well," I said slowly, "it's been a hard week." "It's been hard for me, too; harder, I think, than for you. It wasn't fair

PHILADELPHIA, January 27. Maggie, dear: I'm writing to you just before dinner while I wait for Fred. He's down at the box-office looking up advance sales. I tell you, Maggie Monahan, we're strictly in it—we Obermullers. That Broadway hit of mine has preceded me here, and we've got the town, I suspect, in advance. But I'm not writing to tell you this. I've got something more interesting to tell you, my dear old Cruelty chum. I want you to pretend to yourself that you see me, Mag, as I came out of