e poplar, the apple of the proprietor's eye.

This was better, and in a sense it was also worse; for Sissy could
plainly see La Tourtillotte, a gaunt, businesslike creature in short
rainy-day skirt and sweater, her long, thin arms going like
pump-handles, her dark, tense face set upon a goal which seemed ever to
flee before her as her weary feet carried her slowly and still more
slowly around the circular track.

Despite her shocked sense of propriety,--and the lawless young Madigans
had very strict ideas as to the conventions for adults,--the ardor of
the struggle, the uncertainty of the issue, seized upon Sissy. She heard
a swift call from Irene, some distance below, and was vaguely aware that
the company, skirted and otherwise, was beating a retreat. But the
smaller of the two contestants, on the other side of the knot-hole, had
just come within the field of Sissy's rude lens. It was pitiable to see
the haggard look on the German woman's plump face, the childish
breakdown imminent behind the woman's staring eyes that met the bored
glance of the male spectators doggedly, though her stout little body was
still being carried resolutely, sluggishly, painfully along.

Sissy's hands flew to her breast. Something hurt her there, cried out to
her, threatened her. She was furious with rage and choked with
sympathetic sobs. She wanted to hurt somebody, and Jack Cody's insistent
whistle, which kept sounding the retreat, so irritated and confused her
that she fancied it was he that she would have liked to beat, as a
representative of his cruel sex. But when she looked down, at last awake
to the world on this side of the knot-hole, she saw Crosby Pemberton on
the box at her feet, and knew who it was that she longed to punish for
his own sins and every other man's.

"Quick--quick, Sissy! He's coming!" he cried, tugging at her skirt.

"Who? Go 'way!" Sissy stamped viciously, as she stood clinging to a
limb; yet in that very instant she had seen that all the Madigans and
their train had fled, save this poor servitor at her feet.

"Jan Lally--oh, hurry!"

Around the corner of the opera-house came a short-legged, bald little
German, so stout and so loosely put together that, as he ran, his
jelly-like flesh shook as though it was about to break the loose bag of
skin that held it. It was Lally's opera-house, and Lally was come to
catch trespassers in the act of seeing without paying.

Sissy's heart jumped to her throat. In the c