many scratches she made on my hands and arms. I called to some of the stage hands, who had gathered to the scene, to help her to her room. It took three of these great stalwart fellows to drag her those few feet, she fighting and screaming every step of the way. But overwrought nature snapped as she reached the door, and she fell unconscious to the floor as they were attempting to place her in a chair.

They lifted her, and one of the boys wheeled in a couch from the stage furnishings and placed her upon it. Not one man of the company came near to offer assistance, although all watched the proceeding from their various doorways. Idolized now made his appearance in a bath robe and sent for a physician. His only thought was that she must revive in time for the performance. We worked for an hour trying to bring her back to consciousness, when the doctor declared it was a catalepsy from which she might not recover for days. There was nothing to do, but to remove her to her hotel and give the performance without her.

I played her rôle that afternoon and night, and Bob was the essence of sweet clover honey to me. I was "the dearest little girl in the world to help him out and really gave a most clever performance, etc.,' and flattered and petted me, so that, had I not already summered and wintered him, I too, then, might have thought his strong arms and caressing voice "the prettiest little parlor that ever I did spy." But my heart was with the unconscious girl only a few

blocks away, and when he played our love scenes in the old way that "he who runs might read" and which I understood only too well, I could not refrain from smiling at the very narrow vision of a conceited man whom women have undoubtedly encouraged in believing that there are none who can resist him, not even one who knew him in all his weakness.

Poor Miriam! As I sat by her bed all that night, vainly watching for a sign of consciousness, the events of our lives since we met kept passing before me like a huge, slowly moving panorama. That she had been a good woman when I met her, I never doubted, nor do I think otherwise now. That her relations with this man should have been what they were, I could account for by examining my own experiences and realizing how insidiously and subtly sin creeps upon us by false reasoning and wrong ideals, nurtured in an atmosphere of respected and obeyed licentiousness, where none rebuke the transgressor, but contrarywise, assert that such error is the only way to fame and happiness. And I wish to say, in justice. to some winkers who may have felt constrained to give a girl a kindly bit of advice, that, as a rule, the sneer which rewards such an effort, the absolute defiance with which the offender barricades herself behind the "cast the first stone" and "judge not that ye be not judged" sections of Holy Writ, literally challenging the adviser to dare to set herself, or himself, up as a Christ, is discouraging in the largest degree. The contempt and scorn also visited upon

the head of this "meddlesome adviser" by the man in the case is one of the hardest crosses a person can take upon himself, and, of course, few of us are seeking trouble, especially in the service of others.

I know that even had I told Miriam that night, when she first confessed her "romance," that I saw this outcome for it, had I told her she was building her castle upon the sands of a dissolute character, she would not only have refused to believe me, but she would have silenced me as being woefully uncharitable in that I would not acknowledge a man could change and be a better being if only the right woman guided him.

As she lay there as one dead, save for a wearied moan which now and then escaped her, the lofty, high arguments which excused the "unconventional" in her æsthetic bliss, came pounding through my brain. "I love! I love! I have a right to love. I am supremely happy."

A right at any cost, at any price. Yet now alas, to-day, that price she paid.

And to-night I answered her mentally over those four years of watching at the birth, growth, and death of that unholy passion;

As Patience sings:

"If love is a weed that stings and smarts,

Then why do you wear it next your hearts?"

If the life of morals sound or morals lax is only the matter of opinion, or the way one chooses to view it, why this inexorable law, not made by man, of

suffering, of soul torturing hysteria which laid this poor girl upon her bed in a state of catalepsy. If to "sow the wind" is only a matter of one point of view, why do disease and degeneration come tumbling headlong with "the whirlwind"?

Miriam's white, still face gave me no answer. These laws, not made by man, she had defied in her imagined happiness, and they had laid her low.

Again the little devils bombarded my ears to-night: "He has a wife. He has a wife," and I smiled this time, a sad yet sympathetic smile, to that little woman across the seas. She at least had found a solace in her children; so much had a legal tie done for her, no matter how prosaic and unæsthetic we may wish to argue it. And he, the man who had tortured this white victim now before me into unconsciousness, would stand by that legal claim, which he had contended was so galling in his wooing of "the other woman," stand by it and his wife before the world and in reality, while this poor creature, no greater sinner than himself, must go down and out of his life since the tie which bound them had no master behind it to compel him to do his duty. On his selfish lust alone lay "the other woman's" claims to his care, and that had already burnt itself to ashes.

CHAPTER XVIII.

SOME OTHER MIRIAMS.

That I have given you Miriam's history thus far in considerable detail, must not be taken as showing her as one individual who happened to sin and suffer in seeking fame.

Summing up my twenty years spent in these surroundings, collectively considering the many women I have met (and my acquaintance is a large one for during my connection with Miriam alone we were constantly associating with all the "higher lights," exchanging performances, suppers, and companionship) I assert that in all these groups the majority were women of the genus so pertinently described by Dumas as "the order of specked peaches." Yet while the "worm i' the bud" was kept almost always zealously from the public, it was none the less known to us. We never fooled one another, although it rather pleased us to imagine we did; for I remember on one occasion a charming girl, whose dainty personality is one of the most admired on the stage to-day, leaving a luncheon party given by one of our women's clubs with the remark that "her angel mamma had asked her to return early"; and I recall the smile that almost simultaneously came to our lips, though no word was spoken, as we recollected that the