lerton
had just left the 'ouse, miss."

Chapter II

While Allerton and Miss Walbrook had been conducting this debate a
dissimilar yet parallel scene was enacted in a mean house in a mean
street on the other side of the Park. Viewed from the outside, the
house was one of those survivals of more primitive times which you
will still run across in the richest as well as in the poorest
districts of New York. A tiny wooden structure of two low stories, it
connected with the sidewalk by a flight of steps of a third of the
height of the whole facade. Flat-roofed and clap-boarded, it had once
been painted gray with white facings, but time, weather, and soot had
defaced these neat colors to a hideous pepper-and-salt.

Within, a toy entry led directly to a toy stairway, and by a door on
the left into a toy living-room. In the toy living-room a man of
forty-odd was saying to a girl of perhaps twenty-three,

"So you'll not give it up, won't you?"

The girl cringed as the man stood over her, but pressing her hand over
something she had slipped within the opening at the neck of her cheap
shirtwaist, she maintained her ground. The face she raised to him was
at once terrified and determined, tremulous with tears and yet defiant
with some new exercise of will power.

"No, I'll not give it up."

"We'll see."

He said it quietly enough, the menace being less in his tone than in
himself. He was so plainly the cheap sport bully that there could have
been nothing but a menace in his personality. Flashy male good looks
got a kind of brilliancy from a set of big, strong teeth the whiter
for their contrast with a black, brigand-like mustache. He was so well
dressed in his cheap sport way as to be out of keeping with the
dilapidation of the room, in which there was hardly a table or a chair
which stood firmly on its legs, or a curtain or a covering which
didn't reek with dust and germs. A worn, thin carpet gaped in holes;
what had once been a sofa stood against a wall, shockingly
disemboweled. Through a door ajar one glimpsed a toy kitchen where the
stove had lost a leg and was now supported by a brick. It was plain
that the master of the house was one of those for whom any lair is
sufficient as a home as long as he can cut a dash outside.

Quiveringly, as if in terror of a blow, the girl explained herself
breathlessly: "The castin' director sent for me just as I was makin'
tracks for home. He ast me if this was the on'y suit