n, whose pale, ugly eyes
fairly blazed at her, as he repeated:

"To pay--me out. You brawsted little Treachery, you----"

She crimsoned to her hair; you could see the red blood rushing and rushing
up from under the peekaboo embroidery in front of the tawdry blowse, in a
hurry to tell her tingling ears what cruel names he called her.

"To pay you out at first it was. An' afterwards"--her throat hurt her, and
her eyes did smart and burn so--"afterwards I--I wanted ... O Gawd!..."
she shook all over--"you'll never walk out wi' me no more after this!"

"You may take your dyin' oath I won't." He was bitterly sarcastic.
"Strite, an' no kid, didn't you know when you done--_that_--I'd never
forgive you as long as I lived?"

He plucked the stout package of letters signed "Fare Air" from his
indignant bosom, and threw them at her feet, with the new pipe, her
hapless gift. His wrath was infinitely more terrible than she had
imagined. Her tongue clave to the roof of her mouth. Everything kep'
a-spinnin' so, she couldn't 'ardly tell whether she was on 'er 'ead or 'er
'eels. She will remember that day to the last breath she draws....

"Didn't you know it?" the voice of her judge demanded again.

John Tow, finding himself no longer an object of attention, had discreetly
vanished.

"Oh, I did, I did!" Her agony was frantic. "Oh, let me go away and hide
and die somewhere! Oh, crooil, to break a pore gal's 'art! Wot--wot loves
the bloomin' earth under your feet!"

"Garn!"--the scorn of W. Keyse was something awful--"you an' your
love----"

She wrenched the cotton lace away from her thin throat, and tore some of
her hair out in the strenuous hysteria of her class, and screamed at him:

"Me an' my love!... Go on!... Frow it in me face, an' 'ave no pity! Me an'
my love!... Sneer at it, take an' spit on it--ain't it yours all the syme?
Oh, for Gawd's syke forgive me!"

He struck an indomitable attitude and thundered:

"So 'elp me Jiminy Cripps, I never will!"

She knew that the oath was irrevocable, and with a faint moan, turned to
the great boulder that was behind her, and clung to its hard red bosom as
if it had been a mother's. She moaned to him as her thin figure flattened
itself against the stone, to let her go away and die somewhere. He stood a
moment looking at her, and exulting in his power, meaning her to suffer
yet a little longer ere he relented. Secretly, he knew relief that the
golden pigtail and the provoking bl