under her arm and drew forth a gaily painted hen that
clucked and laid a painted egg, to the uproarious delight of Henrietta.

Henrietta meanwhile had begun counting the change in her side-bag.

"I don't never like to break a bill unless I've got to," she remarked,
returning the Holy Virgin to Angela's arms; "but I'm going to have one
of them chickens too," and away she went after the fakir. A moment later
she emerged from the crowd with a little brown box under her arm, and we
three continued our walk westward along Bleecker, dropping little Angela
at the corner of the street which was to lead her to the day-nursery
where she would pick up her baby and carry it home.

"That was a 'fatal wedding' for fair, wasn't it?" I remarked, as my eyes
followed the little figure.

But my companion paid no attention to my attempt to be facetious, if
indeed she heard the remark at all. She seemed to be deep in a brown
study, and several times I caught her watching me narrowly from the
corner of her eye. I was already beginning to have some misgivings as
to the temperamental fitness of my strange "learner" and new-found
friend as a steady, day-in-and-day-out person with whom to live and eat
and sleep. And this feeling increased with every block we covered, for
by and by I found myself studying Henrietta in the same furtive manner
as she was evidently studying me.

At last, when we had exchanged the holiday gaiety and the sunshine of
Bleecker Street for a dark, noisome side-street, she broke out
explosively:

"Hope to God you ain't going to turn out the way my last room-mate did!"

"Why? What did she do?"

"Went crazy," came the laconic reply, and she shivered and drew the old
golf-cape more closely about her shoulders; for the damp of the dark,
silent tenements on either side seemed to strike to the marrow.
Something in her manner seemed to say, "Ask no more questions," but
nevertheless I pursued the subject.

"Went crazy! How?"

"I d'know; she just went sudden crazy. She come to Springer's one day
just like you, and she said how she was wanting to find a place to board
cheap; and she was kind of down in the mouth, and she come home with me;
and all of a sudden in the night I woke up with her screamin' and going
on something fearful, and I run down and got the Dago lady in the
basement to come up, and her man run for the police. They took her away
to the lock-up in the hurry-up wagon, and the next day they said she was
cra