to express sympathy for him, but he was
in need of a match for the cigarette he held. Hailing the chauffeur, he
had the next instant forgotten his demand.

They drove in silence until they reached the house that had been prepared
for their hiding-place. "Furnished rooms--Light Housekeeping" was
inscribed on a card, tacked conspicuously in the doorway.

A woman near middle age, inclined to be fleshy, with large features that
reflected the dim hall light, met them, her arms akimbo.

"Everything's all right for you folks. Upstairs front. There's a gas
stove in the closet if you all--

"We ain't pikers--we'll get our eats sent in. Here, take this." Druce put
a slip of paper and a greenback into Elsie's hand.

"Go to the drug-store there at the corner and get this prescription
filled," he ordered. "It's morphine. I've got to sleep tonight."

Elsie obeyed passively. When she returned Druce was pacing the room wild
with impatience. His greenbacks and a bottle of absinthe lay on the
table.

He lost no time in resorting to the morphine. "Absinthe is the stuff to
put life in your body; but it's the good old dope to make you forget all
your troubles," he soliloquized, Very shortly he was on the bed, sound
asleep.

Elsie paced softly back and forth in the room for a long time. Then she
went out into the dark hallway. She opened the window and stood looking
into the street. It was quiet there. The stars looked down on a deserted
way.

That big bright star over there! Was it not the one she and her sister
used to choose when wishing from their bedroom window at Millville! How
long ago that seemed; how wide and dreadful life's abyss between!

"If I had known, if I had known!" Elsie shuddered and glanced towards the
closed door. "I was bound to have my own way. My--own--way. That's it.
There was something in me--" She faced her actions, she probed into her
thoughts from the hour she first met Martin Druce. She marshalled her
scathing shames before the judgment bar of her womanhood. In the flaming
fires of tortured conscience she stood and suffered.

Then she began to wonder about the future. Where was she bound? Where
would he be sent? What strange lands might she see?

How could she go with him? How could she stay behind? The street--the
dreadful streets of night!

Elsie shuddered, remembering those nights in the Levee, the fear and
horror, and at last the shameful, gnawing hunger that drove her to him
again.

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