meet Mark.

But a subtle change in the girl dated from that day; casual and foolish
as the affair with Carter had been, it left its scar. Julia's heart
winced away from the thought of him as she herself might have shrunk
from fire. She never forgave him.

It was good to find Mark still enslaved, everything soothing and
reassuring. When Julia left him, at her own door at six o'clock, she was
her radiant, confident self again, and they kissed each other at parting
like true lovers. To his eager demand for a promise Julia still returned
a staid, "Mama'd be crazy, Mark. I ain't sixteen yet!" but on this
enchanted afternoon she had consented to linger, on Kearney Street,
before the trays of rings in jewellers' windows, and it was in the
wildest spirits that Mark bounded on upstairs to his own apartment.

Julia had expected to find her mother at home. Instead the room was
empty, but the gas was flaring high, and all about was more than the
customary disorder; there were evidences that Emeline had left home in
something of a hurry. The girl searched until she found the explanatory
note, and read it with knitted brow.

"I'm going to Santa Rosa on important business, deary," Emeline had
scribbled, "and you'd better go to Min's for a few days. I'll write and
leave you know if there is anything in it, otherwise there's no use
getting Min and the girls started talking. There's ten dollars in the
hairpin box. With love, Mama."

"Well, I'd give a good deal to know what struck Em," said Mrs. Tarbury,
for the hundredth time. It was late in the evening of the same day, and
the lady and Julia were in the room shared by Miss Connie Girard and
Miss Rose Ransome. Both the young actresses had previously appeared in a
skit at a local vaudeville house, but had come home to prepare for a
supper to be given by friends in their own profession, after the
theatres had closed. Each girl had a bureau of her own, hopelessly
cluttered and crowded, and over each bureau an unshielded gas jet
flared.

"Well, I'm _going_ to know!" Julia added, in a heavy, significant tone.
She had come to feel herself very much abused by her mother's treatment,
and was inclined to entertain ugly suspicions.

"Oh, come now!" Rose Ransome said, scowling at herself in a hand mirror
as she carefully rouged her lips. "Don't you get any silly notions in
your head!"

"No," Mrs. Tarbury added heavily, as she rocked comfortably to and fro,
"no, that ain't Em. Em is a cut