Mrs. Lally, with all her babies and busy housekeeping, to do with
business? He was so astonished and perplexed by the sudden onslaught
that the wriggling Crosby managed to slip out of his grasp, and got to a
safe distance before Lally realized it.

"Nu!" he grunted. "I cou'n't hire you--no? Vell, you come mitout hire. I
show _you_."

Sissy felt herself lifted down without ceremony and dragged off. Her
round face was white, her heart was beating like the stamps at the
Chollar pan-mill. Yet her train trailed after her still in mock dignity.
So did Crosby, at a respectful distance, fearing to follow, yet, though
helpless, incapable of desertion. But at the entrance to the opera-house
the door was shut in his face.

Sissy and her captor entered. The stage had been built out over the pit,
and in the very first row of the dress-circle, the rim of which was the
boundary of the contestants' suffering feet, Jan Lally sat down, with
Sissy at his side.

Ah, to sit in the front row of the dress-circle! To feel the opulence of
one's enviable position, as well as the artistic delight of being
properly placed where one could miss nothing, while the brass band
outside the opera-house played its third and last quick, jubilant
invitation to pleasure--so tantalizing to the outsider, so gratifying to
the fortunate one within!

Many and many a time had Sissy Madigan waited, during first and second
bands, for some miracle to set her where she now sat! Many a time had
the third selection been played, the players with their instruments
filed into Paradise, and the poor Madigan peri remained shut outside.

But now Cecilia hung her head, shamed by being caught; shamed by
punishment; shamed trebly by the fact that, apart from those poor
sexless, half-maddened machines tottering feverishly around and forever
around, she, Sissy Madigan, the proud, the pure, the proper, was the one
thing womanly in the house!

It was not a full house by any means, and only the men immediately next
to her seemed aware of her presence. Yet, with a consciousness that
seared her soul and humbled the pride of the childish prude as with a
stain upon her purity, Sissy felt the compounded, composite gaze of man
upon woman out of place. It withered, it scorched, it stung her.

But finally Von Hagen, the little German woman, going the round of her
maddening treadmill, reached the spot where Sissy sat. The sight of a
child there, of a bare, bowed, neat little head in