from an unshuttered window as he passed. He reached his room door,
entered, but instead of lighting the gas and shutting the door, stood
with it half open, listening in the darkness.
His suspicions were verified; there was a slight rustling noise, and
a figure which had evidently followed him appeared at the end of the
passage. It was that of a woman habited in a grayish dress and cloak of
the same color; but as she passed across the band of moonlight he had
a distinct view of her anxious, worried face. It was a face no longer
young; it was worn with illness, but still replete with a delicacy and
faded beauty so inconsistent with her avowed profession that he felt a
sudden pang of pain and doubt. The next moment she had vanished in her
room, leaving the same faint perfume behind her. He closed his door
softly, lit the gas, and sat down in a state of perplexity. That swift
glimpse of her face and figure had made her story improbable to the
point of absurdity, or possibly to the extreme of pathos!
It seemed incredible that a woman of that quality should be forced to
accept a vocation at once so low, so distasteful, and so unremunerative.
With her evident antecedents, had she no friends but this common Western
night watchman of a bank? Had Roberts deceived him? Was his whole story
a fabrication, and was there some complicity between the two? What was
it? He knit his brows.
Mr. Breeze had that overpowering knowledge of the world which only comes
with the experience of twenty-five, and to this he superadded the active
imagination of a newspaper man. A plot to rob the bank? These mysterious
absences, that luggage which he doubted not was empty and intended for
spoil! But why encumber herself with the two children? Here his common
sense and instinct of the ludicrous returned and he smiled.
But he could not believe in the ballet dancer! He wondered, indeed, how
any manager could have accepted the grim satire of that pale, worried
face among the fairies, that sad refinement amid their vacant smiles and
rouged checks. And then, growing sad again, he comforted himself with
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