Abey Lewis did not at all understand her, though he had handled a variety of people during his long career as a purveyor of "refined vaudeville" to the public. He confessed as much to Mr. Smitherton, with whom, as Miss Burton's business manager, he came into constant association.

"I don't get her at all, Mr. Smitherton," he querulously complained.

"I've known most of the big-time artists that have come along in vodeville, and she ain't like none of them I ever seen. I've made a lot of head-liners, but this girl acts like it gives her a pain to talk to me. She don't seem to take no interest in her act."

The business manager chewed irritably on his cigar. They were sitting in the darkened theater while Mary Burton was being rehearsed in the short and dramatic sketch which Smitherton had secured for her.

"Has it occurred to you, Lewis," he suggested, with a certain coolness of manner, "that you wouldn't be paying Miss Burton the salary you are if she was like anybody else you've known? Haven't you considered the fact that this lady is going to pack your place to capacity because of her difference?"

"Maybe so. Maybe she's a big novelty, and I ain't kicking," assented the other. "But it does seem to me she ought to be more grateful--for the chance she's getting. She's a knock-out all right! Them eyes ought to get the folks going--I wish she'd use 'em more."

The two sat silent for a while with the empty chairs around them, then Mr. Abey Lewis raised the megaphone with which he was directing and spoke to the stage.

"Daughter," he instructed, "you ain't quite got the psychology of the part yet." Mary Burton came down toward the front of the stage, with her fore-arm raised across her face to shut off the glare of the "foots," as she listened. Mr. Lewis rose and walked thoughtfully down the aisle toward her. It was Mr. Lewis' intent to handle very delicately this new headliner whom he failed to comprehend, and of whom he stood in secret awe.

"Now you see, daughter," he went on, "this act gives you a great chance for emotion, and I know, when you get the right angle on it, you'll eat it up. You've just got wise there, where I broke in, to the fact that your husband's a criminal. You ain't never suspected he was a crook before. Now that calls for emotion.... Put more color into it.... Pound it a little harder. When George ends his long speech and pauses, that brings you across, see? It cues your reception of the news. It throws a bomb under you. In times like them women get more hysterical. They ain't quiet in grief, like men, so just cut loose a little more. Give us a nice little scream."

For once Mary Burton almost smiled, as she hearkened to this wise dissertation on emotion, but she only bowed her head in assent, as the director added: "Take the scene up again at George's entrance."

When he sat down beside Smitherton, Abey Lewis shook his head. "I ain't sure we didn't make a mistake in giving her a straight dramatic sketch,"

he said dubiously. "She ain't got no emotion. She needs more pep. Now if she had an act with lots of changes of costume--something that would show her off better, it might go bigger."

Smitherton growled.

"Yes, and then you wouldn't have her at all," he retorted. "Get it through your head that this whole thing is distasteful to Miss Burton.

It's bad enough as it is, without asking her to do a diving Venus."

"She won't ever be an actor," commented Mr. Lewis, sagely, "but what the hell's the difference? It's the name that's going to carry this act--and it's going to be a knock-out."

CHAPTER XXXIV

The day of the ordeal arrived. Mary could not remember any occasion to which she had gone with such a sense of terror and misgiving, but this neither Mr. Lewis nor any of his subordinates suspected. It had pleased the management to call a morning rehearsal, so Mary had not been able to go home before her matinee debut. Tomorrow, if all went well, she could remove her parents to a greater comfort, so it was her affair to see that all went well.

Her mother had been less well than usual during these last few days and Mary had impressed upon old Tom Burton the necessity of remaining on watch during her own absence. But, out of the advance she had received, Old Tom had drawn a small allowance, and it was remarkable how greatly the manner of bartenders had changed for the better in the brief space of a few days. By forenoon Thomas Standish Burton was more than tipsy, and by two o'clock as he emerged from a side door his step was so unsteady that he found the slippery footing a matter requiring studious attention. Once he would have fallen had a policeman not caught his arm.

"I thank you, sir," acknowledged the old man, "I am deeply gra'fle, sir."

"You're deeply loaded," replied the officer. "I ought to run you in for your own protection."

"I'm sure--" Burton's eyes were watery and his voice thick--"you wouldn't do that. M' wife's sick an'--"

"Well, get on back to her, and--if you want good advice--when you get indoors, stay in." With a kindly tolerance the policeman assisted the pedestrian across the street and watched him tack along until he was lost to sight.

It was a bad day for uncertain feet and legs. The town lay locked in a grip of ice which sheeted streets and sidewalks with a treacherous danger. Horses struggled with hooves that shot outward, and children slid merrily and the elderly picked their way with a guarded caution.

Old Tom Burton made the trip back to the lodging-house and up the double flight of stairs in safety. One leg was a little painful, for in that fine irony, which sometimes seems to prove Life a cynical humorist, Thomas Standish Burton had been endowed with a single relic of wealth and epicureanism--he suffered from gout. So, as he climbed, he laboriously favored the crippled foot.

Then he opened the door of his wife's room and entered. But after one step he stood still, then he brushed a sleeve across his eyes to see more clearly. Elizabeth Burton lay, full length, on the floor near her chair--and she seemed unconscious. The old man hurried over to her and succeeded in lifting her weight to the bed. She must have suffered a heart-attack and fallen as she tried to cross the room alone. A great fear seized upon his heart and in some degree sobered him. He listened for the heart-beat and clasped shaking fingers to a wrist that at first seemed pulseless. But at last he found a faint flutter of life in the body he had thought lifeless--so faint and wavering a flutter that it seemed only a whispered echo of a departed vitality.

For a while he stood stupefied, then he thought of Mary. Of course, he must send word to Mary. Perhaps, too, life could still be coaxed back, if a doctor came quickly enough. Down the stairs he hobbled with a speed that drove him into a sort of frantic and clumsy gallop. On the first floor he knocked on the landlord's door and implored him to call a physician at once, while he himself went out to the telephone.

The nearest instrument was in a saloon and hither the old man hurried.

Mary had given him the number of the stage 'phone, and he called it.

Despite the coldness of the afternoon, perspiration burst out and beaded his forehead as he waited--only to hear the exasperating voice of the operator announce, "Busy." Three times this was repeated and while he waited, pacing frenziedly back and forth, he sought, after each successive failure, to allay the jump and tremor of his shocked nerves with whiskey, and he poured generously.

At last he had the theater number and was told that Miss Burton could not answer just then, but a message would be delivered.

"Tell her to come home at once," he shouted wildly into the receiver.

"Her mother's dying."

"Wait," came the somewhat startled reply. Then after a moment a new and truculent voice sounded in his ear.

"What is this," it demanded, "a bum joke you're trying to put over, or what? Come home at once!--Don't you know a packed house is waiting to see Miss Burton in her act? What do ye mean, come home at once?"

"But I tell you--"

"Go tell it somewhere else." Thomas Burton did not know that it was Abey Lewis himself who spoke. "I don't believe you--you're trying to string somebody--and if the Queen of China was dying she couldn't come now anyways."

Slowly Abey Lewis turned from the receiver he had abruptly hung up and beckoned the subordinate who had first taken the message.

"Don't mention this to anybody," directed the chief tersely. "Do you get me? The girl mustn't hear it--and if any telegrams or messages come, you bring 'em to me, first, see?" Then to the stage door-man he gave a similar command, and looked at his watch. It was two forty-five. Mary's act, held for the latter part of the bill, was not due for an hour. For just a moment Mr. Lewis considered the advisability of advancing it on the program. That might be safer--but also it would mar the climacteric effect and so offend his sense of artistic fitness. He thought that, after all, he had safeguarded matters well enough.

But Old Tom Burton had rushed out of the saloon and was hastening at his awkward gallop to the Eighth-street station of the elevated. He was going to tell Mary in person and to bring her home.

Around the turn of the rails he saw a train coming, and, urged by his obsession of haste, he strove for a greater speed. The top steps were slippery, and Old Tom was giddy and his legs uncertain. His foot shot sideways without warning, and his body went hurtling backward. He clutched desperately for the hand-rail and missed it. Down the long flight of iron-edged stairs, in a bundle of ragged old humanity, he rolled limply, and lay shapeless on the pavement. At once, a rush of feet brought a little crowd, and the same policeman who had helped him home earlier bent over him.

"Who is he?" asked someone, and the officer shook his head.

"Search me," he said. "He smells like a booze-barrel. I ought to have locked him up the first time."

An ambulance came with much clanging of its gong, and when they examined him at Bellevue, searching his pockets, they found some letters and Mary's memorandum. So they learned his identity, and sent a telephone message to the theater--to be followed a half-hour later by a second announcing that life was extinct.

But while old Thomas was making his dash for the top of the stairs at the elevated, the landlord, followed by a physician, tapped on the door of the room Thomas Burton had left--and, receiving no response, the pair went in. Swiftly the doctor labored, and as the powerful hypodermic worked, the old woman rallied a little and her lids wavered and opened.

Her eyes wandered about the place and she spoke with a feeble voice.

"Who are you?"

"I am the doctor, but you mustn't try to talk," came the grave reply.

"Where are my children--my boys and my girl?" Elizabeth Burton's face suddenly became a face of terror and her eyes dilated. "Where are my children?" she once more demanded.

"There is no one here just now." The doctor spoke as soothingly as he could. "You mustn't talk."

A spark of returned sanity crept into the dying woman's pupils and she groaned. "No one here! I remember," she said while she shook with a sudden realization. "I remember--they're all gone." Her gaze traveled around the squalid room, and realized what that meant, too. "Am I dying?" she inquired. The physician murmured something evasive, and from her thin lips broke a low, smothered outcry. "Yes," she said, striving to rise and falling back, "I'm dying--alone--abandoned--by myself--in this attic."

Then her eyes closed. The physician bent over the bed with his fingers on the pulse, and then bent his ear to the breast.