ings, and, honest, I don't see how you
could suspect them. Ever since I came over here I've been so jolly.
Seems to me I've been nothing but jolly. I've been having such a good
time! How you could see under it, I don't know. As a matter of fact,
I've always been jolly between-times. Give me half a chance, let me get
out of the frying-pan, I'd be ready in a minute to go on a picnic. But
I've not been spared my troubles, Geraldino; you were right there."

At this reference to many sorrows, he found a thing to do more
expressive than words. Sitting near each other as they were, he could
reach her without rising; he bent forward and touched his lips
commiseratingly to her hand.

He might have known that it would bring her story, but he had not
schemed for this, and, unwilling, yet eager, to hear, was a prey to
compunctions on more than one ground when, after a little gulp and
sniff, she burst forth:

"I've seen perfectly dreadful times, Geraldino. Some of them were the
sort of thing you can get over, but some of them--upon my word, I wonder
at myself how I've got over them as I have. The queer thing is--I
haven't, in a way. It will come over me sometimes, in the queerest
places, at the oddest moments, that I am still that woman to whom such
awful things happened, that I, playing my silly monkey-shines, am that
heart-broken woman."

"I know," murmured Gerald, and took her plump hands steadyingly between
his hard, thin ones.

"I've never had any sense," she let herself go. "Anybody can see that;
and when I was younger I had even less, naturally, than I have now.
Always, always, I wanted so to be happy! I wanted to have a good time. I
was born wanting to have a good time. And everything was against it. But
I managed somehow. One way or another, I got to the circus 'most every
time. My mother used to wonder what my finish would be, and try to lick
the Old Boy out of me. But it couldn't be done. I'm just like my father,
my dear old pa, who was a sinner. He let ma have her way in everything,
as he thought it right to do. Not, I guess, because he always liked her
way, but because after my sister, who was a beautiful child, died in
such a terrible way that I can't even bear to mention it,--she caught
fire,"--Aurora hurriedly interjected, "ma came so near going out of her
senses that pa humored her in everything. He thought the world of her;
so did we all, but it couldn't be called a happy home. There were three
boys, besides