't stop minding; it's too late. I've minded so long--too long and
too much. I've put you before Joe--before Milicent even. I've--"

"Don't say anything you'll be sorry for," he interposed, turning into a
side street. "You're on your nerves--flat on your nerves."

She promptly proved his assertion by slipping without warning from his
side. They had chanced abreast of a rambling little church tucked with
its trees and shrubbery and greensward amidst buildings which dwarfed its
tower to a pretty toy. Some droll giant might have plucked it out of
Trollope and set it here to throw off its atmosphere like a fragrance
from rectory to chantry. Its lich-gate held an image before which Mrs.
Hilliard melted in a welter of devotion.

"Tommyrot," fumed her guide, nonplussed at this new vagary.

Ignored, Shelby braced himself patiently against a pillar in the dusky
recess while the penitent knelt and pattered in deeps of contrition which
the ministrations of her low-church rector in New Babylon had never
plumbed. But patience vanished at the sound of footsteps up the street.

"Quit it, that's a good girl," he begged, reconnoitring.

Despite the lively devil's deputy at elbow the appeal wavered on.

"It's a policeman coming. He'll think--" Shelby broke off his
conjecture to utter some banality about the moon, to drown her
invocation. Wayside prayers were no more a novelty than wayside curses
in this region, and the officer rolled indifferently by. "Now go back to
your hotel, and get to bed," pleaded the man, gasping like a criminal
with a reprieve. "Things will look brighter in the morning. I'll be in
to see you before my train leaves."

Her devotions at an end, she issued docilely to the pavement, saying,
"You can't know the comfort."

"It's a pity it isn't contagious," commented Shelby, grimly; but before
they quitted the shadows for the lights of Fifth Avenue he added gently
that he begrudged her nothing.

Directly he saw the elevator whisk her to her room, the man posted back
to the music hall in search of Volney Sprague. What he should say to him
was not clear, but see him he must. Out of the jumble of his thoughts
that idea beset him like an obsession. The audience had begun to trickle
into Broadway, and as the stream broadened to fill the doorway he was
hard put to it to scan every face, but he persisted till the last
loiterer had left. Then an attendant told him that the place had yet
another exit u