if coated over with tallow. She opened the door slowly, fearing
to break the spell--then suddenly slipped through the aperture and
slammed it after her. Then the slam of another door; the scurrying of
feet down cold stone steps that sprung echoes in the deserted street.

The douse of cold air stung her flaming cheek; a policeman glanced after
her; a drunken sailor staggered out of a black doorway, and her
trembling limbs sped faster--a labyrinth of city streets and rows of
blank-faced houses; an occasional pedestrian, who glanced after her
because she wheezed in her throat, and ever so often gathered her
strength and broke into a run; then a close, ill-smelling apartment
house, with a tipsy gas-light mewling in the hall, and a dull-brown door
that remained blank to her knocks and rings. The sobs were rising in her
throat, and the trembling in her limbs shook her as with ague.

A knock that was more of a pound and a frenzied rattling of the knob!
Finally from the inside of the door a thump-thump down a long
hallway--and the door creaked open cautiously, suspiciously!

In its frame a pale figure, in the rumpled clothes of one always sitting
down and hunched on a pair of silver-mounted mahogany crutches that
slanted from her sides like props.

"Goldie! Little Goldie!"

"Oh, Addie! Addie!"

* * * * *

Youth has rebound like a rubber ball. Batted up against the back fence,
she bounces back into the heart of a rose-bush or into the carefully
weeded, radishless radish-bed of the kitchen garden.

Mrs. Trimp rose from the couch-bed davenport of the Bopp
sitting-dining-sleeping-room, with something of the old lamps burning
in her eyes and a full-lipped mouth to which clung the memory of smiles.
Even Psyche, abandoned by love, smiled a specious smile when she posed
for the scalpel.

Eddie Bopp reached out a protective arm and drew Goldie by the sleeve of
her shirt-waist down to the couch-bed davenport again.

"Take it easy there, Goldie. Don't get yourself all excited again."

"But it's just like you say, Eddie--I got the law on my side. I got him
on the grounds of cruelty if--if I show nothin' but--but this cheek."

"Sure, you have, Goldie; but you just sit quiet. Addie, come in here and
make Goldie behave her little self."

"I'm all right, Eddie. Gee! With Addie treating me like I was a queen in
a gilt crown, and you skidding round me like a tire, I feel like cream!"

Eddie regarde