ating and luring. Often as a very
little girl she had slept in a room as bare as this and listened
contentedly to the rattle of storm-shaken shutters. She had cuddled, a
warm, soft shape, under the blankets, and sunk sweetly, dreamily into
unconsciousness and happy dreams. It was so easy! There, in a drawer
where she had thrust it, with abhorrence for the emblem of a
contemptible weakness, was Paul's hypodermic needle. This very night she
could again drift, unresisting, into sleep, and while she slept the
gas-jet could flow free.

The room was cold. Sitting upright in her bed, she shivered. Then, as
she realized how seriously she had yielded for a panic-ridden moment to
the temptation of turning her back on life's need of courage, the
shiver grew from a shudder of the flesh to a shudder of the soul. She
lay down again and hid her face in the pillow.

From the next room she heard the heavy snore of her father and the
gentler sleeping breath of her mother. Personal preferences and
prejudices belonged to the past.

Very well--she still had the flaming Burton courage. She would do this
hateful thing, and when she gazed on the eyes that glutted their
curiosity with staring, she would meet them serenely and give them no
sign that she was being tortured.

And this thing Mary Burton did--did with that calm dignity which is
vouchsafed to those whose souls are of heroic quality.

It was only when the day's work of rehearsal ended and she was locked
again in her own room that she sat dry-eyed and wretched, remembering a
dozen things which made her shudder. But as she walked along the streets
she kept her eyes to the front, because she could not tell from what
wall one of those blazing "three sheets" might confront her. They were
advertising her as Mary Hamilton Burton--that the value of those two
names might doubly pique the curiosity of the morbid.

Also, she avoided as a pestilence the newspapers, and what they might
contain.

Abey Lewis did not at all understand her, though he had handled a
variety of people during his long career as a purveyor of "refined
vaudeville" to the public. He confessed as much to Mr. Smitherton, with
whom, as Miss Burton's business manager, he came into constant
association.

"I don't get her at all, Mr. Smitherton," he querulously complained.
"I've known most of the big-time artists that have come along in
vodeville, and she ain't like none of them I ever seen. I've made a lot
of head-line