e passed. She lay under hedges, her bed was often in the
snow. To Ballybay she was as much an object of loathing and of horror as
though she were some wild beast that men might lawfully destroy.

The girl herself had no compensation for all this dread outlawry. The
Traviatas of other lands are painted for us in gilded saloons, with
costly wines in golden goblets, and noble lovers sighing for their
smiles. But Betty, outcast, hungry, and houseless, had not one second's
enjoyment of life. The faith in which she had been trained still held
its grip upon her, and neither vice nor drink nor human cruelty could
relax its grasp. She was a sinner against Heaven's most sacred law; and
after brief life came death, and after death eternal torment. Pursued by
this ever-present spectre she drank and drank, and awoke more wretched
than ever, and then she drank again.

She would sometimes seek refuge from her burning shame and from her
tortured soul in fierce revolt. She rolled in mad delirium through the
streets, yelled the blasphemies in the shuddering ears of Ballybay,
fought the police who came to arrest her, developed, in short, into a
raging demon. Her face became bloated, her expression horrible to
witness. One day, as she passed through the streets in one of these
frenzies, she met Mat Blake. She shivered in every limb, and a pang, as
from the thrust of a dagger, passed through her heart. But she attempted
all the more to steel her nerves, and to harden her face. She raised her
eyes and glared, but the eyes fell, and she slunk away.

And thus it was that Mat saw, for the first time since his return to
Ballybay, the gentle, timid, lovely girl who had once willingly stood
between him and death.

A few minutes afterwards, Betty's mother appeared. Her features bore the
traces of the deepest grief that had yet assailed her. All pride had
gone from that once imperious face; she was a stooped, shame-faced, old
woman. As Mat looked at her there rushed before his memory the many
momentous hours of his life with which that face was bound up, his days
of childhood in her prosperous home, his association with her daughter,
and the glad hours during the first election of Crowe, when life was
still full of glorious hope, and she had dashed the glad vision with the
first breath of suspicion and anticipated evil.

They looked at each other silently for a moment, and then she shook her
head, and with a look of infinite grief in her eyes, s