hand squeezed hers.

"Your Freddie sure will do that for you," he said. "Let's go upstairs now, and figure out what we'll need."

Daisy suffered him to pull her out of her chair by the hand he held. Still retaining it, he led her out of the dining-room, along the hall, and up the stairway. At the top, she halted—fetching her companion, who had kept right on going, to a standstill with a jerk.

"Come on, come on," he said, making his tone matter-of-course, "the room is No. 19."

"What's the number of my room?" said Daisy, regarding him pleasantly but with a kind of odd under-gleam in her eyes.

"Y—your room!" Even Beatty, the inured, was embarrassed by that searching, direct look. "Why, I—I—darned if I remember the number."

Daisy continued to look at him a moment; then the shine in her eyes was succeeded by a twinkle, and this by a promising, coaxing side-glance.

"Well, then, let's go into the women's sitting-room, Freddie—this time."

Beatty knew when to yield a point—so he flattered himself.

"All right, Sweetest," he said, "you're the doctor—always."

They passed into the "ladies' parlor," which was empty, except for a few articles of faded furniture, among which a new red settee in one corner glowed with a preternatural brilliance. Beatty sat on the red settee and drew the girl down beside him.

"Somebody got a kiss for her Freddie?" he said, his lips loosely apart and wrinkles springing into view at the sides of his nostrils.

"Oh, I—do' know," Daisy dropped her head a little; "let's just talk. It's nice to sit together an' talk, when we love each other so, isn't it?"

Beatty's answer to this was to thrust his arm about her waist, push his palm beneath her chin, and pull up her face toward his. The girl resisted at first; then, with a motion of yielding, laid her head back on his shoulder and raised her lips. Beatty kissed her, not reverently but roughly; then kissed her again; then again and again: burying his mouth into hers. A little hand came up and caressed his neck; then slipped down within his coat and rested as it were, upon his heart—moving softly, as though feeling for its beats.

Then hand and girl and all tore suddenly and strongly away—and Daisy Nixon was upon her feet, her cheeks glowing like fire, laughing as she held up the leather purse she had taken from his pocket.

"It was the only way!" she cried, breathlessly and sparklingly, as he sat agape; "the only way to get out of you what you owe to me, for the things I have let you think about me, Mr. Fred Beatty. You thought I didn't know all about you—what you did to poor Pearlie Brodie, making her the talk of Toddburn, with worse to come yet—a poor motherless girl, who was given up by a decent fellow that would have married her, if it hadn't been for you. You thought I didn't know. Yes: you thought I 'fell for you', as you'd call it. But I'll tell you what I did, an' you can put it in your pipe an' smoke it, and I hope it'll do you good. I needed you. I needed to get away from that place where I was wasting my life, and I had no money—so I used you. I've met ginks like you before. I could see through you from the first like a pane of glass—you poor, miserable imitation of a man!

"Now, I'm going to take this money and use it, to keep me till I get a job somewhere. Then I'm going to pay it back. But not to you—don't you ever think it. I'm going to send it to Pearlie Brodie. She'll need it badly enough, in a few months from now. She'd never have got it from you straight—never in this world—so she'll get it through me. Now, you get out of here! I've wasted too much breath talking to you. And keep this in your memory-box: I don't know you! So don't speak to me, if I ever have the bad luck to meet you again!"

The girl had barely finished speaking, when Beatty leaped at her, grabbing for the purse which she held. But she stepped quickly back—and, as he pressed in, gave him, with all the strength of her virile young body, a push that sent him sprawling.

"You give me that money," Beatty said, his face pasty and mean with fury, as he climbed to his feet and stood, slowly dusting off his clothes; "that's all I want out o' you. Hand it over, or I'll go down and phone for a constable, and have you taken to the police station.

"Yes—you will!" Daisy challenged. "I suppose you think no person around Toddburn ever reads the city papers and notices what the law does to a fellow that brings a girl sixteen years old to a hotel. Go down and phone for the police, if you feel like it! I know who they'll take back with them when they come, and it won't be me. And I'll tell you something more, Mr. Smart Man: If you're not out of here in the next three minutes or less, I'll phone for the constable. It makes me sick to look at you. I want to go and wash my mouth, too. It'll take a good many washings to make it feel as clean as it did before you touched it. Get away from here!"

"Well," Beatty growled, after a moment, as a distant step down the hall portended the coming of one of the hotel staff, probably attracted by the sound of the raised voices and scuffling, "keep the money, then, you blamed nickel's worth o' nothing. I'll get the worth of it out o' you some other way, yet—you watch me! There's goin' to come a time when you'll need me, an' you'd better fasten onto this," he took a card from his pocket and tossed it down on the settee. "Till then, I'll bid you 'good-day'."

Therewith—in his intense self-reverence, half-expecting to be called back before he reached the street-door—Mr. Frederick S. Beatty turned on his heel and stalked out.

But Daisy did not call him back. Neither, be it said, did she hasten to wash her mouth. As the slam of the door downstairs gave ostentatious notice of Beatty's exit, she moved to the window, watching him up the sidewalk with an odd, half-maternal look.

"That call-down may do you some good, Mr. Naughty man," she murmured; "you've had too easy a time with girls—that's what ails you, principally."

CHAPTER III. The Maid and the Clerk.

"'Usbands are hodd duckies," said a voice, accompanying the pat and shake of one of the cushions on the settee where Beatty and Daisy had been sitting. "So they har."

The remark suggested experience, and contained an obvious invitation to confidences. Daisy, her eyes still thoughtful, turned and beheld a hectic sylph, with an insinuating expression and a feather-duster. Hair of an elusive hue was gathered into a cone at the back of her head. At the base of this cone, a piece of white cambric was pinned like a saddle. Frank lengths of mature, brown-stockinged leg, in contour like exclamation-marks, rushed upward, as it were, in hot pursuit of a skirt-hem which they did not succeed in overtaking until it had nearly reached the sylph's knee. She had a long chin, and lips that were pursed, not into a line, but into a kind of mincing rosette.

"Ar, ee—yes—s", she pursued. The way she held her mouth made "yes" a hard word to get through that puckered aperture. She undulated like an ostrich-neck for a moment, then came to attention, with her head on one side, and a hand primping cautiously at her coiffure. Her eyes had fixed themselves on Daisy's "ring-finger", innocent of any certifying circlet of gold.

"'Usbands har queer," she repeated; her glance, after a short sharp sketch of Daisy's figure, coming to rest on the girl's face, "arn't they?"

Daisy Nixon had knocked around quite a