d, stepping nearer, returned the purse.

"'Scuse me, miss," he said uneasily. "I didn't know it was youse--honest
to Gawd, I didn't! 'Scuse me, miss. Good-night!"

For a moment the girl stood there motionless, looking down the alleyway
after the retreating figure. From somewhere in the distance came the
rumble of an elevated train. It drowned out the pound of the man's
speeding footsteps; it died away itself--and now there was no other
sound. A pucker, strangely wistful, curiously perturbed, came and
furrowed her forehead into little wrinkles, and then she turned and
walked slowly on along the deserted street.

The White Moll! She shook her head a little. The attack had not unnerved
her. Why should it? It was simply that the man had not recognized her
at first in the darkness. The White Moll here at night in one of the
loneliest, as well as one of the most vicious and abandoned, quarters
of New York, was as safe and inviolate as--as--She shook her head again.
Her mind did not instantly suggest a comparison that seemed wholly
adequate. The pucker deepened, but the sensitive, delicately chiseled
lips parted now in a smile. Well, she was safer here than anywhere else
in the world, that was all.

It was the first time that anything like this had happened, and, for the
very reason that it was unprecedented, it seemed to stir her memory now,
and awaken a dormant train of thought. The White Moll! She remembered
the first time she had ever been called by that name. It took her back
almost three years, and since that time, here in this sordid realm
of crime and misery, the name of Rhoda Gray, her own name, her actual
identity, seemed to have become lost, obliterated in that of the
White Moll. A "dip" had given it to her, and the underworld, quick and
trenchant in its "monikers," had instantly ratified it. There was not
a crook or denizen of crimeland, probably, who did not know the White
Moll; there was, probably, not one to-day who knew, or cared, that she
was Rhoda Gray!

She went on, traversing block after block, entering a less deserted,
though no less unsavory, neighborhood. Here, a saloon flung a sudden
glow of yellow light athwart the sidewalk as its swinging doors jerked
apart; and a form lurched out into the night; there, from a dance-hall
came the rattle of a tinny piano, the squeak of a raspy violin, a
high-pitched, hectic burst of laughter; while, flanking the street
on each side, like interjected inanimate blot