id not have to go up
to the place where this unknown girl had thrown away the greatest gift.
As we walked through the poorly lighted streets toward the Tottenham
Court Road I felt for the first time a surge of that emotion that Leila
Burton had voiced, a pity for the dead girl. And yet, stealing a look at
Dick as he walked onward quietly, sadly, but with a dignity that lifted
him above the sordidness of the circumstances, I felt that I could not
blame him as I should. It was London, I thought, and life that had
tightened the rope on the girl.

Strangely I felt a lightness of relief in the realization that the
catastrophe having come, was not really as terrible as it had seemed
back there in Leila's room. It was an old story that many women had
conned, and since, after all, Dick Allport was yet young, and my own, I
condoned the sin for the sake of the sinner; and yet, even as I held the
thought close to my aching heart, I felt that I was somehow letting slip
from my shoulders the cross that had been laid upon them, the cross
that I should have borne, the burden of shame and sorrow for the wrong
that the man I loved had done to the girl who had died for love of him.

The place where she lay, a gruesome establishment set in behind that
highway of reeking cheapness, the Tottenham Court Road, was very quiet
when we entered. A black-garbed man came to meet us from a room in which
we saw two tall candles burning. Dick spoke to him sharply, asking if
any one had come to look after the dead girl.

"No one with authority," the man whined--"just a girl as lived with her
off and on."

He stood, rubbing his hands together as Dick went into hurried details
with him, and I went past them into the room where the candles burned.
For an instant, as I stood at the door, I had the desire to run away
from it all, but I pulled myself together and went over to the place
where lay the girl they had called Bessie Lowe.

I had drawn back the sheet and was standing looking down at the white
face when I heard a sob in the room. I replaced the covering and turned
to see in the corner the shadowy form of a woman whose eyes blazed at me
out of the dark. While I hesitated, wondering if this were the girl who
had lived occasionally with Bessie Lowe, she came closer, staring at me
with scornful hate. Miserably thin, wretchedly nervous as she was, she
had donned for the nonce a mantle of dignity that she seemed to be
trailing as she approached, glar