rehending face, now.
"And he's awful smart, too. The firm wants to send him to the branch
store in Rochester and put him in charge of Gent's Furnishings. I guess
I'd like to live there ... where everybody'd be strange. Jerry, he don't
know where I live. I never let him bring me clear home. Mrs.
Richards--she's the matron--she says he'll find out about me some day
and hate me, but he won't find out. Nobody knows except Irene and the
people here,--and nobody'd be mean enough to just go and tattle to
him,--would they?"

"Oh, I don't believe any one would, intentionally. But" (how appeal to a
sense of fair play where no fair play had been?) "that isn't what
frightens me, Ethel."

"What? You needn't be scared about Billiken. She'll be all right. They're
awful nice people, rich and everything, and they're crazy to have her. 'A
blue-eyed girl with curly hair and a cheerful disposition,' they says to
Irene. And they think her mother's dead."

"I wasn't thinking of Billiken."

"Oh," said Ethel, warily.

"I was thinking of Jerry. If he's as fine as you say he is----"

"He is!"

"Then I think it's pretty mean not to play fair with him, don't you?
Come," said Jane with a brisk heartiness she was far from feeling, "tell
him to-day, right now, when you go back."

She shook a stubborn head. "Now you're being just like all the rest of
'em. I thought you sort of--understood."

"I think I do. But I believe you must tell him."

"Well, it's too late now. Irene's coming today to take Billiken. It's
all settled and everything. It's too late now, even if I wanted to.
Besides"--she flamed with hot color again--"I couldn't tell him in the
daytime ... right there in the store!"

"Oh, Ethel--in anything so big,--something that means your whole
life,--time and place can't matter."

The girl began to dab at her eyes with a damp, small wad of blue-bordered
handkerchief. "I just couldn't tell him in the daytime. I nearly did,
last night. I meant to, 'cross-my-heart,' I did! We went for a walk, and
I was just--just sort of beginning when a woman came sneaking by
and--said something to him. _You_ know. And he said--'Poor devil!'
That's what he called her. '_Poor devil!_' That's just how he said it."
Now she dropped her inadequate handkerchief and wept convulsively into
her hands and a thin shaft of sunshine lighted up the meager solitaire.

Billiken leaned forward, her fat, small face filled with contrition and
patted her mother on her