. The variety-man swore he'd kill her for leavin', for
she drew at the last bigger houses than he ever had again. How she
learned it all you couldn't tell, but the night we all turned out to see
her in _The Rover's Bride_ you'd have said yourself she was
wonderful--painted of course, and fixed off, but a voice that made you
cry, an' a way just as natural as if she believed every word she said.
An' when she came out the third time, after such a stampin' an' callin'
as you never heard, with her eyes shinin' an' _such_ a smile, I cried
with all my might.

"It was the very next day. Charley Calkins was bar-tender in a saloon,
but getting off whenever he could to see Nan act. That was another
thing. She wouldn't take any fancy name, but was Nan Evans straight
through--on the bills an' everywhere--an' every one she'd grown up with
went to see her, an' felt sort of proud to think she belonged to the
Fourth Ward. An' a strange thing was, that, though so many were after
her, she never seemed to care for anybody but this Charley, that had
knocked her round himself, though he wouldn't let anybody else.

"Well, the old woman that had taken her first was dyin'. She was
Charley's aunt, an' so she sent for him, for want of any other relation,
an' told him she'd a little money for him, an' was a mind to give a
little to Nan. Charley said, 'All right!' He knew she most likely had a
good bit, for they often do, but then he said, 'You've always kept to
yourself where you got Nan, an' I'm a mind to know.'--'Simpson's, up the
Bowery,' she said; an' that was the very last word she ever spoke. She
left thirteen hundred dollars in the Bowery Bank, an' it seemed as if
there were odd sums in every bunch of rags in the room, so that Charley
had enough to set him up pretty well. An' it didn't take him long after
he started his own saloon near the theatre to find out, among all the
Simpsons, the woman that had had Nan. She had her store still, an' a
young woman to help her, an' she cried a little when Charley told her.
But she was a member of the Mott Street Church, an' when she said,
'Where is she now? and why don't she come herself?' an' Charley said,
'She couldn't, because rehearsal's going on,' she looked at him.

"'Re-what?' says she.

"'Re-hearsal: she's an actress,' says he; an' she shut her eyes up as if
the sight of him after such words was poison.

"'I want nothing to do with her,' says she. 'I've had my fill of sorrow
an' trouble fr