isted my hand off!" Lily said; "oh, ain't he the beast?" She
cringed and shook her bruised wrist, then gave Maurice an admiring look.
"My soul and body! you lit into him good!" she said; "what am I going to
do? I'm afraid to go in."

"If I had a house of my own," Maurice said, "I'd take you home, and my
wife would look after you. But we are boarding.... Haven't you some
friend you could go to for to-night? ... To-morrow my wife will come and
see you," he declared.

"Oh, gracious me, no!" In the midst of her anger she couldn't help
laughing. ("He's a reg'lar baby!" she thought.) "No; your wife's a busy
society lady, I'm sure. Don't bother about me. I'll just wait round till
he goes to sleep." She dabbed at her eyes with a little wet ball of a
handkerchief.

"Here, take mine," he said. And with this larger and dryer piece of
linen, she did manage to make her face more presentable.

"When he's asleep, I'll slip in," she said.

"Well, let's go and sit down somewhere," Maurice suggested. She agreed,
and there was some haphazard wandering about in the darkness, then a
weary sitting on a bench in the park, marking time till Batty would
surely be asleep.

"You sure handed one out to him," Lily said.

Maurice chuckled at the role of knight-errant which she seemed to
discern in him, but he talked earnestly of her future, and once or
twice, soothed by his voice, she dozed--but he didn't know it. Indeed,
he told himself afterward that her silences showed how his words were
sinking in! "It only goes to prove," he thought, when at midnight he
left her at her own door, "that the _flower_ is in all of them! If you
only go about it right, you can bring their purity to the surface! She
felt all I said. Eleanor will be awfully interested in her."

He was quite sure about Eleanor; he had entirely forgiven her; he wanted
to wake her up, and sit on the edge of her bed, and tell her of his
evening, and what a glorious thing it would be to lift one lovely young
soul from the gutter.

CHAPTER X

But Eleanor would not "wake up." Within an hour of her foolish outbreak
she had begun to listen for his returning step. Then she went to bed and
cried and cried, "He doesn't love me," she said, over and over; and once
she said, "it is because I am--" But she didn't finish this; she just
got up and went over to the bureau and stared into the mirror; she even
lit a candle and held it close to the glass; after a while she saw what
she