r only a moment later that Leafy touched her arm.

"Mr. Meier has taken a suite for you here in this hotel," she said.
"Can't you eat a little, Miss?"

Eat? She had never had enough to eat in her life. Her life? She had
spent her life securing food for the lodger that he might teach her to
be famous. Leafy lifted the spoon of hot soup to her lips and
immediately she drank--she who had never had enough to eat in her
life. Morsel by morsel from the bountifully filled table the kindly
dresser fed her. Obediently she ate, and the hot, rich food stimulated
her to swifter, more agonizing thought.

Then, for the first time, she saw Arthur Noyes standing with his back
against a closed door. She read pity in his eyes, comprehension, great
wonder, and what she did not know then was the love that came to a
rare perfection between them and has never faded--and has no place in
this story.

"Will you tell me," he said, "what your name is, where your home is,
and who are those that love you there?"

Then he broke off and shrank a little against the door. "Oh, don't,"
he protested.

Yet she had only looked at him and smiled. But it came to her keenly
in her new awareness that his questions covered the whole of a woman's
life: Her name, her home, and the ones that loved her there. While
she--she had no name, she did not even know the lodger's name. She
looked down with strange astonishment at her grown-up figure, her
woman's hands. She saw herself a ragged, gaunt, bushy-headed child
moving on a tight rope above a dark abyss, intent only upon a luminous
globe floating just out of reach ahead of her, that she stretched out
for eagerly with both her hands. Suddenly the lovely bubble burst and
the child was a woman, falling and falling among rows of convulsed,
shining white faces to the sound of gargantuan laughter.

"You tell me," Arthur Noyes pleaded gently.

And she did so very simply and beautifully. She did know Shakespeare;
it was the only English that she had ever been taught. So Noyes heard
how she became an instrument in the hands of the man who hated him
mortally, and owed her debut and her terrible awakening to what he
considered the only sporting answer to that insult. While he listened
he pondered, awestruck, upon the fact that out of all this muck and
blackness, the degradation of hate by the lodger, the refinement of
hate by himself, had flowered that rarest of all human creatures--one
that could make the whole worl