n't
regret a thing up there in the Square except that lovely red coat with
the high collar and the hat with the fur on it. I'd give--Tom, get me
a coat like that and I'll marry you for life.

No, there's one thing I could do better if it was to be done over
again. I could make that dear little old Bishop wish harder I'd been
his daughter.

What am I mooning about? Oh--nothing. There's the watch--Edward's
watch. Take it.

II.

Yes, empty-handed, Tom Dorgan. And I can't honestly say I didn't have
the chance, but--if my hands are empty my head is full.

Listen.

There's a girl I know with short brown hair, a turned-up nose and gray
eyes, rather far apart. You know her, too? Well, she can't help that.

But this girl--oh, she makes such a pretty boy! And the ladies at the
hotel over in Brooklyn, they just dote on her when she's not only a boy
but a bell-boy. Her name may be Nancy when she's in petticoats, but in
trousers she's Nathaniel--in short, Nat.

Now, Nat, in blue and buttons, with his nails kept better than most
boys', with his curly hair parted in the middle, and with a gentle tang
to his voice that makes him almost girlish--who would suspect Nat of
having a stolen pass-key in his pocket and a pretty fair knowledge of
the contents of almost every top bureau-drawer in the hotel?

Not Mrs. Sarah Kingdon, a widow just arrived from Philadelphia, and
desperately gone on young Mr. George Moriway, also fresh from
Philadelphia, and desperately gone on Mrs. Kingdon's money.

The tips that lady gave the bad boy Nat! I knew I couldn't make you
believe it any other way; that's why I passed 'em on to you, Tommy-boy.

The hotel woman, you know, girls, is a hotel woman because she isn't
fit to be anything else. She's lazy and selfish and little, and she's
shifted all her legitimate cares on to the proprietor's shoulders. She
actually--you can understand and share my indignation, can't you, Tom,
as you've shared other things?--she even gives over her black tin box
full of valuables to the hotel clerk to put in the safe; the coward!
But her vanity--ah, there's where we get her, such speculators as you
and myself. She's got to outshine the woman who sits at the next
table, and so she borrows her diamonds from the clerk, wears 'em like
the peacock she is, and trembles till they're back in the safe again.

In the meantime she locks them up in the tin box which she puts in her
top bureau-drawer, hides t