"Hotel! God, it's hell! And you are in forever!"

Carmen gazed at the excited woman with a puzzled expression on her
face.

"Now listen," said Jude, bracing herself, "I've got something to tell
you. You have been--good God! I can't--I can't! For God's sake, child,
don't look at me that way! Who are you? Where do you come from?"

"I told you," replied Carmen quietly.

"Your face looks as if you had come down from the sky. But if you did,
and if you believe in a God, you had better pray to Him now!"

"Why--I am not afraid. God is everywhere--right here. I was afraid--a
little--at first. But not now. When we stop and just know that we love
everybody, and that everybody really loves us, why, we can't be afraid
any more, can we?"

The woman looked up at the child in blank amazement. Love! That
warped, twisted word conveyed no meaning to her. And God--it was only
a convenient execrative. But--what was it that looked out from that
strange girl's eyes? What was it that held her fascinated there? What
was emerging from those unfathomable depths, twining itself about her
withered heart and expanding her black, shrunken soul? Whence came
that beautiful, white life that she was going to blast? And could she,
after all? Then what stayed her now?

"Look here," she cried sharply, "tell me again all about yourself, and
about your friends and family down south, and what it was that the
Madam said to you! And be quick!"

Carmen sat down at her feet, and taking her hand, went again over the
story. As the child talked, the woman's hard eyes widened, and now and
then a big tear rolled down the painted cheek. Her thought began to
stray back, far back, along the wreck-strewn path over which she
herself had come. At last in the dim haze she saw again the little New
England farm, and her father, stern, but honest and respected,
trudging behind the plow. In the cottage she saw her white-haired
mother, every lineament bespeaking her Puritan origin, hovering over
her little household like a benediction. Then night fell, swiftly as
the eagle swoops down upon its prey, and she awoke from a terrible
dream, stained, abandoned, lost--and seared with a foul oath to drag
down to her own level every innocent girl upon whom her hands might
thereafter fall!

"And I have just had to know," Carmen concluded, "every minute since I
left Simiti, that God was everywhere, and that He would not let any
harm come to me. But when we really know that, why,