he foot of the
narrow, dirty staircase.

"Let's go up quiet," she said. "If any of the others are about, I don't
want 'em to know tonight. See?"

"I see," said Martin.

And it was good to watch the way in which she took hold of herself with
a grip of iron, scrubbed her face with his handkerchief, dabbed it
thickly with powder from a small silver box, threw back her head and
went up two stairs at a time. On the second floor there was a cackle of
laughter, but doors were shut. On the third all was quiet. But on the
fourth the tall, thin, Raphael-headed man was drunk again, arguing
thickly in the usual cloud of smoke, which drifted sullenly into the
passage through the open door.

With deft fingers Tootles used her latchkey, and they slipped into the
apartment like thieves. And then Martin took the pins out of her little
once-white hat, drew her coat off, picked her up as if she were a child
and put her on the sofa.

"There you are, Tootles," he said, without aggressive cheerfulness, but
still cheerful. "You lie there, young 'un, and I'll get you something
to eat. It's nearly a day since you saw food."

And after a little while, humanized by the honest kindness of this
obvious man, she sat up and leaned on an elbow and watched him through
the gap in the curtains that hid her domestic arrangements. He was
scrambling some eggs. He had made a pile of chicken sandwiches and laid
the table. He had put some flowers that he had brought for her earlier
in the evening in the middle of it, stuck into an empty milk bottle. In
her excitement and joy about the play, she had forgotten to put them in
water. They were distinctly sad.

"Me word!" she said to herself, through the aftermath of her emotion.
"That's some boy. Gee, that's some good boy." Even her thoughts were
conducted in a mixture of Brixton and Broadway.

"Now, then," he said, "all ready, marm," and put his handiwork in what
he hoped was an appetizing manner on the table. The hot eggs were on a
cold plate, but did that really matter?

Not to Tootles, who was glad to get anything, anyhow. That room was the
Ritz Hotel in comparison with the slatterly tenement in which she had
won through the first unsoaped years of a sordid life. And
Martin--well, Martin was something out of a fairy tale.

Between them they made a clean sweep of everything, falling back
finally on a huge round box of candies contributed the previous day by
Martin.

They made short work of severa