at she belonged,
she--Nancy--to this wonderland of the stage!

You must never tell Tom, Mag, promise! He wouldn't see. He couldn't
understand. I couldn't make him know what I felt any more than I'd
dare tell him what I did.

I shut the door.

But not behind me. I shut it on the street and--Mag, I shut for ever
another door, too; the old door that opens out on Crooked Street. With
my hand on my heart, that was beating as though it would burst, I flew
back again through the black corridor, through the wings and out to
Obermuller's office. With both my hands I ripped open the neck of my
dress, and, pulling the chain with that great diamond hanging to it, I
broke it with a tug, and threw the whole thing down on the desk in
front of him.

"For God's sake!" I yelled. "Don't make it so easy for me to steal!"

I don't know what happened for a minute. I could see his face change
half a dozen ways in as many seconds. He took it up in his fingers at
last. It swung there at the end of the slender little broken chain
like a great drop of shining water, blushing and sparkling and
trembling.

His hands trembled, too, and he looked up at last from the diamond to
my face.

"It's worth at least fifty thousand, you know--valued at that."

I didn't answer.

He got up and came over to where I had thrown myself on a bench.

"What's the matter, Olden? Don't I pay you enough?"

"I want to see Tom," I begged. "It's so long since he--He's up
at--at--in the country."

"Sing Sing?"

I nodded.

"You poor little devil!"

That finished me. I'm not used to being pitied. I sobbed and sobbed
as though some dam had broken inside of me. You see, Mag, I knew in
that minute that I'd been afraid, deathly afraid of Fred Obermuller's
face, when it's scornful and sarcastic, and of his voice, when it cuts
the flesh of self-conceit off your very bones. And the contrast--well,
it was too much for me.

But something came quick to sober me.

It was Gray. She stormed in, followed by Lord Harold and Topham, and
half the company.

"The diamond, the rose diamond!" she shrieked. "It's gone! And the
carpenters say that new girl Olden came flying from the direction of my
dressing-room. I'll hold you responsible--"

"Hush-sh!" Obermuller lifted his hands and nodded over toward me.

"Olden!" she squealed. "Grab her, Topham. I'll bet she stole that
diamond, and she can't have got rid of it yet."

Topham jumped toward me, bu