excitedly, with a fearful glance behind her.

"Do you want me to call a cab for you?" sneered the girl on the
sidewalk, with an envious glance at the white satin slippers.

"Oh, no! Never!" cried Betty, wringing her hands in desperation. "I want
you to show me somewhere to go out of sight, and if you will I'd like
you to walk a block or so with me so I won't be so--so conspicuous! I'm
so frightened I don't know which way to go."

"What do you want to go at all for?" asked the girl bluntly, with the
look of an inquisitor, and the intolerance of the young for its
contemporary of another social class.

"Because I _must_!" said Betty with terror in her voice. "They're
coming! Listen! Oh, help me quick! I can't wait to explain!"

Betty dashed out of the gate and would have started up the street but
that a strong young arm came out like a flash and a firm young fist
gripped her arm like a vise. The girl's keen ears had caught a sound of
turning key and excited voices, and her quick eyes pierced the darkness
of the narrow court and measured the distance back.

"Here! You can't go togged out like that!" she ordered in quite a
different tone. She flung off her own long coat and threw it around the
shrinking little white figure, then knelt and deftly turned up the long
satin draperies out of sight and fixed them firmly with a pin extracted
from somewhere about her person. Quickly she stood up and pulled off her
rubbers, her eye on the long dark passageway whence came now the
decided sound of a forcibly opened door and footsteps.

"Put these on, quick!" she whispered, lifting first one slippered foot
and then the other and supporting the trembling Betty in her strong
young arms, while she snapped on the rubbers.

Lastly, she jerked the rakish hat from her own head, crammed it down
hard over the orange-wreathed brow and gave her strange protegee a hasty
shove.

"Now beat it around that corner and wait till I come!" she whispered,
and turning planted herself in an idle attitude just under the church
window, craning her neck and apparently listening to the music. A second
later an excited usher, preceded by the janitor, came clattering down
the passageway.

"Have you seen any one go out of this gate recently?" asked the usher.

The girl, hatless and coatless in the chill November night, turned
nonchalantly at the question, surveyed the usher coolly from the point
of his patent leather shoes to the white gardenia in his bu