and comfort her. That was all she needed, some pitying heart to hold her close and tell her not to grieve.

I sprang to my feet at last, and throwing on a long wrapper, started for her door. As I did so, another sound froze me to the spot on which I was standing. The door on the other side had opened. I heard a shuffling, heavy body lumber into the next room. The sobbing ceased as if by magic, and the softest, most cooing albeit tear damp voice murmured:

"Is that you Robert, dear?"

A grunt from "the beast"; a heavy shoe thrown with a thud on the floor; and I broke from my trance to fly to the elevator, and demanded of the boy to tell the clerk in the office to give me another room at once! at once!

CHAPTER IV.

IN WHICH MISS GRAY IS VERY UNPROFESSIONAL.

As I mentioned in the case of Miss Sears, the constant unvarying food of hotels, the unseemly hour in which trains are "caught," the nerve racking journeys for one-night stands, are not conducive to very robust health, and mine must have begun to be undermined sometime before the incidents at the close of the last chapter. However, it was not until that experience that I felt a heavy fever, an almost never ending throbbing in my head and a general depression verging on melancholia.

I tried to be the same to Miss Melloweye as I had been before I knew the (to me) terrible state in which she was living, but I know I failed dismally, while she, seeing my physical condition, attributed my actions to ill health and was more than kind and solicitous.

In fact I now met an enigma. I was a "sick little girl," and my heretofore avowed detestors were most kind and sympathetic. Even Mrs. Biber would insist on giving me a bit of whiskey from her flask when the jump was particularly early, and I looked unusually pale. So when we are called a goodhearted and generous people, here is your occasion when it becomes apparent.

But my comforter and stay was Mr. Steele Softlee. No brother could have been kinder. I never knew where my satchel was from one journey to another. On some occasions he even packed the theatre trunk for me, as I had, on each night stand, to care for a large wardrobe trunk which carried the "extra girls' " dresses. He took me from the trains to hotels in a

carriage and paid the expense. If I expressed a desire for any delicacy, it was mine for the asking. He entertained and amused me, in fact devoted himself to me so absolutely that I began to feel a faith and reliance in him and dependence upon him which was absorbing. What wonder, can you tell? I was a girl, alone, among strangers, with no woman's heart protection, no woman companion to whom I could go if I felt a sense of tempation in such an element. Such a fear in this case would have brought forth laughter; a jest from the women with whom I associated. What wonder that a kind solicitous man who gave to me just the sympathetic quality for which my soul was craving should win my faith, my affection, especially when added to this was the deference bestowed upon me by the other members of the company just from the fact, that I was the recipient of this man's attention.

The events which follow came on so gradually that the telling of them is harsh to what the actual occurence was at the time.

My fever was very high one night, the aches and pain in my bones became almost unbearable during

the performance. Somewhere in our travels I had contracted a well developed case of ague. My nerves thoroughly unstrung, it seemed I could bear no more, and while vainly attempting to swallow my midnight lunch, with my kindly companion beside me, gently urging me to "try and cheer up," I burst into the same emotional torrent of tears which Miss Melloweye was so given to shedding; wild, tempestuous sobs. I have heard on every hand that they denote "the artistic temperament," but I know from my first experience with them that they are merely the exaggerated expression of misdirected energy, of overwrought, uncontrolled nerves which at other times is apt to explode itself in violent fits of temper.

In an instant my faithful friend's arms were about me, and I felt myself held in a soft sympathetic embrace, soothing, comforting, peaceful. It was not strange, nor unnatural that his smypathy should take this form of expression. Perhaps for days I had expected it; undoubtedly for days desired it. Any child will long to throw itself on some compassionate breast and comfortably cry out its woes. That I had fallen in love with this man never entered my consciousness, and I know now that I never really did. Yet I wanted to be petted and comforted, and I even accepted his kisses as crumbs from the table of human sympathy. A mother, a sister, a brother would have been the same to me then, but they being denied me, the way was clear for anyone who would give me the tenderness for which my soul was

craving. What more natural? Yet what, oh, heavenly powers! more insidious? It never came to me for a moment what must be his thoughts and emotions until he had gone, and I was calm; then I began to realize faintly that I had given myself, for the first time, into the arms of a man who had spoken no word of love to me, upon whom I had no claim, and yet whose kisses I now felt had been warm and loverlike.

The blood began to tingle in every vein and a new, another, emotion seized me as I thought this man had grown to love me. That such a realization is sweet to any girl, even though she may not return the passion, came upon me fully then. Then again, came a sense of my attitude in the affair. Had I unconsciously encouraged him by accepting his attentions without question? Undoubtedly, then, I owed him a duty; either to love him too, or at once cease all friendly relationship. This latter proposition struck me cold with fear. He had become so much a part of my daily life that I dared not give him up. "And I am ill," I whimpered, "and need someone to love me." But possibly the unexpressed dread of once more being ostracized by the company, as I knew I should surely be if I took the stand of conventionality and lost this protection, weighed greatly in his favor.

He was so much older than I though he was only forty years, still old enough, then, to be my father; yet he was gracious, gentlemanly in his bearing, and,