floor, with her head supported
upon Sissy's shoulder.

She was a brilliant type of the ignorant and vicious population which
overflows the tenements in certain downtown districts and furnishes the
largest element in the city's criminal society. Her eyes were large, and
must have been, under better conditions, full of light and expression.

Even now, when great lumps, dark and burning with inflammation, stood
out upon her forehead, and heavy sashes of black circled her eyes, while
all the rest of her face was white and bloodless and cruelly distorted
with pain--even now there was a kind of beauty about her that gave her
rank above the class to which conditions, more forceful than laws,
condemned her.

Condemned? Yes, condemned; why not? What did she know of the science of
morals, of souls, or revelations, or higher laws? Who had ever mentioned
these things to her. What had she to do with questions of right and
wrong? What was right to her but gratification, or wrong but want? What
was passion but nature pent up, or crime but congested nature suddenly
set free?

She spoke a Christian tongue. She wore a Christian dress. Her heart
answered to the same emotions that quicken or deaden the beat of other
breasts. She had tears to shed, hopes to excite, passions to burn,
desires to gratify. Nature had denied her none of the faculties that
give beauty, and grace and dignity and sweetness to another. Even as she
lay stretched on the floor of a dive in the heart of a Christian city,
but remoter from influences that encourage the good and repress the bad
in her nature than if she were standing in the darkest jungle of
Africa--even there, degraded, ignorant, and infinitely wretched, she was
a martyr to the very virtues, truth and constancy, of which she knew the
least!

Some such reflections as these were flitting through Mr. Dootleby's mind
as he glanced down upon her, and then turned to his enraged antagonist,
who was standing ever alert for a chance to recover his victim.

"Look here," said Mr. Dootleby. "Let's come to terms about this affair.
You can see for yourself that the girl is half dead. You don't want to
kill her outright, I'm sure."

"'Tain't no biznuss of yourn if I do," the old man savagely replied.

"Maybe not. But cool off, now, and be reasonable. You'll be sorry enough
for what you've done already, and if you were to do more you'd have to
stand your trial for murder."

"'Twont be for murderin' her w'en I