ring away the crowd, laid hand upon her.

"You'll have to get back little girl!" he said.

She looked him in the eye; the sudden abandonment to her shame seemed
to lift and to exalt her; afterward, shuddering over that day, she
still remembered a certain perverse pleasure in this moment. And she
spoke loud, so loud that all the crowd might hear.

"He is my father!"

The policeman gave way; she hurried up the stairs. The bearers of
Billy Gray were resting on the top of the first flight. They had
braced him up against the banisters and were trying to rub sense back
into him. She addressed herself straight to the foreman.

"Does this happen often?" she asked.

A good natured and communicative person, he was also enough touched by
his importance as Good Samaritan to answer the question of a stray
little girl.

"Lord yes!" he replied. "Every pay day nowadays. Used to be the
brightest man in the business, too."

Then as she stood there, blown by all the strong cross-winds of the
world, Marshall the editor, who knew Eleanor, came hurrying down the
stairs. He saw that wreckage, grown familiar now to them all, saw the
girl standing white of face beside the balustrade; the situation came
over him at once. He opened the door, drew in both the intoxicated
Billy Gray and his daughter. Half an hour later, when Billy could walk
a little--it was a dead, nerveless intoxication with him
nowadays--Eleanor and the foreman took him home in a cab.

In that long day and night, Eleanor strung together a thousand
half-forgotten incidents, neglects and irregularities of life, and
perceived the truth which her whole world had been in conspiracy to
keep from her. Out of the cross-blowing impulses of an immaturity
which was still half childhood--self pity, shame, heroic pride in her
own tragedy, passionate hatreds of a world which harbors such
things--she came to a resolve in whose very completeness she was happy
for a time. When, before breakfast, she burst into Mattie Tiffany's
boudoir, she had a saintly radiance in her face. The elder woman,
advised by the first words that Eleanor knew, took the little, cold
body into bed with her, petted her back to something like calm. Storm
followed the calm; Eleanor went all to pieces in a burst of passionate
crying.

After she had recovered a little, her purpose came out of her.
Considering her years, she said it all quite simply and
undramatically. It was her business to be with her father. He