sudden convulsion shook her whole frame, her blank expression
broke like a shattered mirror, she threw her hands over her eyes and
fell forward with her face to the back of her chair in an outburst of
tears.

Alas for Jack! with the breaking up of those sealed fountains came her
speech also, at first disconnected and incoherent, and then despairing
and passionate. No! she had no longer friends or home! She had lost and
disgraced them! She had disgraced HERSELF! There was no home for her
but the grave. Why had Jack snatched her from it? Then, bit by bit,
she yielded up her story,--a story decidedly commonplace to Jack,
uninteresting, and even irritating to his fastidiousness. She was a
schoolgirl (not even a convent girl, but the inmate of a Presbyterian
female academy at Napa. Jack shuddered as he remembered to have once
seen certain of the pupils walking with a teacher), and she lived with
her married sister. She had seen Stratton while going to and fro on
the San Francisco boat; she had exchanged notes with him, had met him
secretly, and finally consented to elope with him to Sacramento, only
to discover when the boat had left the wharf the real nature of his
intentions. Jack listened with infinite weariness and inward chafing. He
had read all this before in cheap novelettes, in the police reports, in
the Sunday papers; he had heard a street preacher declaim against
it, and warn young women of the serpent-like wiles of tempters of the
Stratton variety. But even now Jack failed to recognize Stratton as a
serpent, or indeed anything but a blundering cheat and clown, who had
left his dirty 'prentice work on his (Jack's) hands. But the girl was
helpless and, it seemed, homeless, all through a certain desperation
of feeling which, in spite of her tears, he could not but respect. That
momentary shadow of death had exalted her. He stroked his mustache,
pulled down his white waistcoat and her cry, without saying anything.
He did not know that this most objectionable phase of her misery was her
salvation and his own.

But the stewardess would return in a moment. "You'd better tell me what
to call you," he said quietly. "I ought to know my niece's first name."

The girl caught her breath, and, between two sobs, said, "Sophonisba."

Jack winced. It seemed only to need this last sentimental touch to
complete the idiotic situation. "I'll call you Sophy," he said hurriedly
and with an effort.

"And now look here! You are goin