you up to, Rufie, chasing Tilly so? Do you want to scare her into
an idjit?"

Tilly, nestling in happy defiance within the shelter of his strong arm,
tried to tell her woes, while Rufie dancing hotly about outside,
declared in even shriller tones that Tilly deserved a slap and should
get it, adding invitations to the younger girl to come out and see if
she wouldn't, which were of doubtful persuasiveness. At this moment Lucy
appeared in the doorway, the little baby in her arms and a larger one
clinging to her skirts, to look anxiously and angrily after her younger
sisters.

"I've got 'em safe, Lucy," called Nate, restraining his laughing captive
and grasping at the other girl, "I'll bring in the pris'ners--don't you
worry! Now, girls, be good, can't ye? What did Tilly do, Rufie, that
makes you so fierce after her?"

"Stole my ribbon, the little----"

"Eh, eh! Stole is a big word for young lips," interrupted the man, while
the accused protested,

"I didn't neither! I was just lookin' at it to see if 'twould match my
new dress a lady guv me."

"Oh, looking!" was Rufie's sneering rejoinder. "Where is it now? Didn't
I see you tuck it in your pocket, you thief o' the----"

"Sh--h! That's not nice talk for a pretty gal like you, Rufie. Don't
call names like a hoodlum. Where's the ribbon, Tilly?"

"There, you old stingy!" bringing it forth with a flirt, to slap it
across her sister's face, at which the later snatched it eagerly with a
few choice epithets, which flowed as easily from her young lips as if
she had been ages old in sin.

Nate looked from one to the other, and the amused smile died out of his
face.

"I don't like you when you're that way, girls," he said in a hopeless
tone. "See how you worry sister!" for Lucy was calling fretfully,

"I do wish you two could be still one second! Tommy was asleep, and baby
almost, when you began screeching like a fire engine and racing and
slamming through the house--where's pa, Nate?"

"Pa? Oh, he--he's around uptown some'ers."

"I s'pose 'some'ers' means up to Lon's, as usual," snapped the girl
bitterly. "He might better live there and be done with it."

She was a slight creature, too pale and worn for even the natural
prettiness of youth, but her large, lovely eyes suggested that in a more
fortunate environment she might have been described as beautiful, by
that stretch of imagination which chroniclers of the great are allowed.
Many a so-called beauty of high cas