fetime. She was wrapped in a long and
ragged cloak, and her eyes, startling in their blackness, were fixed
upon the pain-drawn countenance of the poor little hurt boy behind them,
with a gleam whose feverish hatred and deep malignant enjoyment of his
very evident sufferings, was like a revelation from the lowest pit to
the two innocent-minded girls hastening forward on their errand of
mercy.

"Is he much hurt?" gasped the woman in an ineffectual effort to conceal
the evil nature of her interest. "Do you think he will die?" with a
shrill lingering emphasis on the last word as if she longed to roll it
like a sweet morsel under her tongue.

"Who are you?" asked Cicely, shrinking to one side with dilated eyes
fixed on the woman's hardened countenance and the white, too white hand
with which she had pointed as she spoke of the child.

"Are you his mother?" queried Paula, paling at the thought but keeping
her ground with an air of unconscious authority.

"His mother!" shrieked the woman, hugging herself in her long cloak and
laughing with fiendish sarcasm: "I look like his mother, don't I? His
eyes--did you notice his eyes? they are just like mine, aren't they? and
his body, poor weazen little thing, looks as if it had drawn sustenance
from mine, don't it? His mother! O heaven!"

Nothing like the suppressed force of this invocation seething as it was
with the worst passions of a depraved human nature, had ever startled
those ears before. Clasping Cicely by the hand, she called out to the
groom behind them, "Guard that child as you would your life!" and then
flashing upon the wretched creature before her with all the force of her
aroused nature, she exclaimed, "If you are not his mother, move aside
and let us pass, we are in search of assistance."

For an instant the woman stood awe-struck before this vision of maidenly
beauty and indignation, then she laughed and cried out with shrill
emphasis:

"When next you look like that, go to your mirror, and when you see the
image it reflects, say to yourself, 'So once looked the woman who defied
me in the Park!'"

With a quick shudder and a feeling as if the noisome cloak of this
degraded being had somehow been dropped upon her own fair and spotless
shoulders, Paula clasped the hand of Cicely more tightly in her own, and
rushed with her down the steps that led into the underground passage
towards which they had been directed.

There were but two persons in it when they ente